Christine Sun Kim’s piece published by Pop up Magazine interested me very much in that the class audience all heard the same information but each subjectively in their own mind. Essentially subtitles cause us to do this as we have to make up the voice psycho-acoustically ourselves. It was interesting to experience silence whilst being lead to think about sound, music and what the poorly defined musical subtitles and audio descriptions meant to her.

The video broadened my perspective to how much information is missing for those who live without sound in their lives on a platform as big as TV and cinema. Inclusivity seems still to have a long way to go, especially when a piece such as this is conceived, however Christine awakens the audience in a light and comedic way whilst all at the same time pushing how serious a point this remains in our society currently. She drives home the point that old standards should never be relied upon in order to provide more of a shared experience if one feels like an outsider in the same space as another.

The actual music and sounds used in this piece felt very much an after thought, and I found this refreshing. Personally I live in a world like the majority of us: audio is not a choice, we can only choose to pay attention to it or ignore it. Often the case with sound in film and TV, the audience is dictated the emotion they should feel at that moment so we find ourselves escaping from our local environment and in another world as our attention is fully captivated by the illusion orchestrated in front of us. Christine brings everyone right back down to reality showing the constraints on how a deaf person might not feel immersed in the entertainment at all in that moment and provides her own spin on audio description conventions in a playful and poetic manner. It feels like a lesson to all not to take your perspective, even if it is a societal norm, for a given and challenge your own way of thinking.