I would like to share some subtitles I have collected in my notes on my phone.

Music-related: [Music and sound fades] [Soaring orchestra music] [Music intensifies] [Mysterious string music] [Somber Music] [Dramatic theme swelling] [Dramatic string music builds] [Music gets faster] [♪♪♪] [***]

Action-related: [humming] [screaming] [breathing] [footsteps approaching] [crying] [wailing] [chattering] [sighing] [sobbing] [yawning]

How can these ‘objective’ subtitle be poetic in its own way? Below are some I’ve wrote.

[Sound of shaping context] [Sound of shifting relationship] [Sound of still silence] [Sound of emptiness in the room] [Sound of seeing] [Sound of communicating gently] [Sound of listening inward] [Sound of whispering sweet nothings] [Sound of worlds shattering] [Sound of remembering fondly]

I wanted to share here my previous experimental project called Partial Gestures. This is a short 16 second video of a cropped Youtube video that shows only the subtitles that appear in two lines at a time:

“Implanted her at the age of four and a half that she would be able to develop near natural speaking skills. Have you met other deaf people who are 20 to 35 years old and who got an implant as an adult out of our 300 patients we”

Hand movements are partially cropped and hidden behind the subtitle to hinder the audience from understanding the context. Behind the subtitle, there is a conversation happening between two people, one of which is using American Sign Language to ask a question. This video is originally from a documentary called ‘Sound & Fury’ directed by Josh Aronson in 2000. You can find more information on this wiki page here. The original video can be found on Youtube on here.

This documentary shows the journey of two sets of parents discussing the future of their children in regards to how much cochlear implant surgery may be ‘beneficial’ or how it could separate the child from one’s Deaf family.

I found the film relevant as Cochlear Implant can be controversially seen as something that ‘erases’ Deaf identity because it usually encourages one to speak and hear instead of using the sign language. At the time of first watching this documentary, I also came across a book titled Made to Hear: Cochlear Implants and Raising Deaf Children by Dr. Laura Mauldin. The book is about the consequences of Cochlear Implant surgery for parents and medical professionals and I found it to be quite informative for me. You can find more info about the book on here. I must’ve been about 10 or 11 when I received the surgery and I do not remember anything particular about what hearing sound was like before switching to digital hearing. As my hearing started to deteriorate from the age of 4, I don’t have much recollection of listening the music with natural hearing. It was intriguing to learn about how a child gets to train the brain to reconfigure the way of listening with new cochlear implant device.

The Co-Designing the Sound Art with Cochlear Implant Users workshop I attended at V&A in 2016 has helped me to understand more about CI and its users’ experiences. Lead by artist Dr. Tom Tlalim, the workshop included a series of interviews conducted to discuss the varied experience of music within Cochlear Implant users. This website showcases multiple interviews and information about the project which can be found here.

As I have been learning more about CI, I became naturally interested in the language of British Sign Language. The mini booklet I have made as a documentation of my journey into learning the British Sign Language alphabet through fingerspelling- it was printed by Berlin based Risograph printing studio WeMakeIt.

This booklet was selected to be part of Artist Self-Publishers fair 2020- as part of showcasing the book, I made Partial Gestures as the video experimentation to accompany this project.

I am looking forward to seeing how I can expand on this process of study and continue to think about the language of subtitle in engaging way through researching!

When watching films, I have often paid attention to subtitles that show sound effects such as:

BBC Academy has online guidelines for subtitles that would be shown across its platforms. I found this line interesting under the Music and songs section – “All music that is part of the action, or significant to the plot, must be indicated in some way.”

Description of music can prepare us for what is about to happen in a film – examples of this are subtitles such as EERIE INSTRUMENTAL MUSIC PLAYS, TENSE MUSIC PLAYS, SUSPENSEFUL MUSIC PLAYS. It can also tell us what the person is feeling – such as HEROIC MUSIC, DRAMATIC MUSIC SWELLS, SENTIMENTAL MUSIC.

I recently watched the well-known 1982 film Blade Runner, during which I noticed that while dramatic music was played, it was shown as (***) – how does (***) convey the atmosphere of the music that is being played? There are cases where the subtitle can be clever with showing context but its importance can be easily neglected.

Regulations for closed captioning started to be introduced in the UK in the 1990s to make video content accessible for d/Deaf and hard-of-hearing people. Whilst in the USA, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was passed in 1990, following which the majority of network providers of programs had to contribute part of their income on captioning to ensure access to verbal information on televisions and films. In 1993 with the Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990 going into effect, TV receivers with picture screens that were 13 inches or larger that were imported in the US had to have built-in decoder circuitry to show closed captions. Decoders used to be sold for $250 at Sears in the 1980s which meant they were not very accessible for some people. Closed captioning started out as an experiment intended only for people who were deaf, yet it became something of an everyday commodity that helped millions of people to connect. A brief history of CC can be found here.

When I was younger, I remember renting VHS tapes from Blockbusters with my family. Specifically, I remember trying to select ones that had the CC logo on them to ensure that I can watch them without worrying. Fast-forwarding to 2021, unfortunately, not all 100% of UK TV shows/films and online video services have subtitles. The UK charity The Royal National Institute for Deaf People (previously known as Action on Hearing Loss) currently has a campaign called Subtitle It! which has been tackling the issue since 2015.

There is still a long way to make existing/future web content fully accessible for everyone- but I am glad there are resources that we can learn from regarding accessibility.

Glass / Glas by Bert Haanstra (1958) is a short documentary that playfully shows the process of glassmaking. This is a compilation of stills featuring hands from the video for visual inspiration. I always have been interested in the movement of hands as they can give a surprising amount of information regarding one’s culture, emotions, and the context of the conversation that is taking place.

Thanks Laura Lulika for the reference!

When I was researching subtitles, I was surprised to learn about the vocabulary of Closed Captions and Subtitles.

Closed Caption is for viewers who cannot hear audio and includes sound effects.

The subtitle is for viewers who can hear audio but cannot understand the language and does not include audio effects.

Most countries outside the USA and Canada tend to merge the two words into one in film and media which explains why I found it confusing!

I also found that Open Caption means it is permanently embedded into the video itself- so it cannot be turned off by the viewer, but that means its style/size/colour can be determined by the creator ahead of time.

Continuing my research, I watched a short documentary called The Invisible Subtitler made in 2013. The documentary discusses the importance of the role of translating subtitles into different languages for films. It is available to watch on Youtube.

The act of translation always fascinates me as one always has to take everything into context to make the best translation. When I was learning English for the first time, I had to memorize definitions of new English words in Korean words. As I learned more about English, I realised that one English word does not always have a single Korean word when translated.

Like language, sound can also be translated in many different ways. In subtitles, the sound can be summed up into a single word or detailed description. It depends on the choice of subtitler or scriptwriter. There are times when the subtitle can just show as (MUSIC) or it can be showing in details such as the title of the music and its lyrics.

Yesterday I enjoyed spending the day exploring archival film footage found at London’s Screen Archives. One thing I have noticed during my research so far is the abundance of content – it’s great to see that so much is readily available. For the next few days, I will continue exploring the collection to get inspired for the visual research.

If there’s any suggestions or references I could research regarding subtitles, please let me know!

I was recently told about this program by a friend as they suggested it might be relevant to my practice. As it sounded super interesting to me, I was worried that it might just be a radio recording without subtitles. But then I was happy to find that there was a subtitled video for people like me – D/deaf people and hard of hearing. My relationship to radio has been pretty much non-existent, the only time I would hear it is when the car didn’t have any interesting music to play, my mom would always turn it on for background sound.

In this 28 min-long video, the Deaf poet Raymond Antrobus talks about his experience with radio, subtitles on TV, and translating sound within the hearing world. Words on the video are constantly flickering, as though we are watching on old static TV. Simultaneously, words are spoken in a flat monotone with interviews from artists and writers in their interpreter’s voices.

Throughout the video, commentaries are shown from Deaf artist (Christine Sun Kim) and Deaf poet (Meg Day), filmmaker (Lindsey Dryden), and caption maker (Calum Davidson), discussing what closed captions mean to them. I found this video really great as it really resonated with my experience and brought back my memories of constantly trying to find something on TV that provided subtitles. In particular, there was a reference by Lindsey Dryden to the film Dawn of the Deaf by Rob Savage. The film makes clever use of subtitles by partially showing them during a scene of a couple fighting using BSL, intentionally not showing the audience the full context of the argument. The mentioned short film can be found on Rob Savage’s website (the video is subtitled).

BBC Radio 4’s “Invention in Sound” can be found on the BBC website- the transcript is also available for download as well.

-Subtitles can easily change the context of video being shown.

-Subtitles can either tell us so much and so little.

-Size and placement of subtitles can be important as they can either hide or reveal what is happening on screen.

-How can the subtitles translate sound?

In my research posts, I would like to include questions, bullet-pointed lines of thinking, comments, and references. Please let me know if you have any questions!

During this week I am hoping to explore more into the unique language of subtitles and begin searching through film archives for more references. I wanted to ask everyone – what does sound mean to you? What is your experience with subtitles?