What does classical music sound like to a Deaf person?
Vancouver artist Silas Ng, who has been Deaf since birth, attempts to recreate the effects in his photo collection Music in My Eyes, which is now showing at Coquitlam’s Evergreen Cultural Centre as part of the 2024 Capture Photography Festival Selected Exhibition Program.
Ng started his photography project in his final year at Emily Carr University of Art + Design, prior to receiving his master’s degree in fine arts at Simon Fraser University, after “wondering how Deaf people can enjoy music that is limited to a feeling of vibration such as a cello or viola,” he told the Tri-City News.
As a kid, he and his brothers studied music through a tutor. Ng took up the cello and piano; however, due to his hearing loss, he couldn’t listen to music or understand the its concepts.
Instead, “I attempted to observe the body movement of musicians when they played the music and it helped me to play music by feeling vibrations and memorizing body movements,” he said, noting he later quit playing.
For Music in My Eyes, Ng used a digital camera with a neutral-density filter — preventing him from creating bright images — to capture musicians’ play in 30 seconds to one minute.
As a result of the long exposure technique, Ng transformed his pictures into blurred motion, casting off an aura of the musicians’ energy as volume.
“My goal is to overcome my limited viewing of sound like music by interpreting the sound with the sense of sight and touch,” Ng said.
“I wanted to encourage visitors to think about how there are many possibilities to explore and interpret the sound world with different art mediums.”
The display at the Evergreen Cultural Centre (1205 Pinetree Way, Coquitlam) can be seen on the facility’s lobby windows until Sept. 4.
