Rain
This video clip, "Rain" by Dr. Jody Cripps who is on SASL's Board of Directors and serves as the
Editor for SASL Journal deserves special attention. Dr. Cripps did this signed music performance back
in 2012. It was only very recently that the video was edited and uploaded to YouTube for public
showing. Dr. Cripps did the "Rain" performance at Balsam Lake, Ontario in Canada before he became
involved in research and has since become a leading expert on signed music. When viewing "Rain",
please pay attention to how Dr. Cripps showed his feelings via texture using different signed notes
along with periodic rhythm beats (including the complications of rhythm beats from time to time) without
any reliance on lyrics. Viewers of "Rain" interested in learning more about this new concept of signed
music can see the growing list of scholarly publications as follows:
Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf. (Series author). (2015). Deaf arts handbook series (Vol. 2 –
Signed music: Rhythm of the heart). Toronto, ON: Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf.
Cripps, J. H., & Lyonblum, E. (2017). Understanding signed music. SASLJ, 1(1), 78-95.
Cripps, J. H., Rosenblum, E., Small, A., & Supalla, S. (2017). A case study on signed music: The
emergence of an inter-performance art. Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, 13(2).
Retrieved from http://liminalities.net/13-2/signedmusic.pdf
Cripps, J. H., Small, A., Rosenblum, E., Supalla, S. J., Whyte, A. K., & Cripps, J. S. (in press). Signed
music and the deaf community. In A. Cruz (Ed.), Culture, deafness & music: Disability studies
and a path to social justice. Rotterdam, NL: Sense Publishers.
(2 minutes long)
The Power of ASL
11
Winter 2017 – Issue 8