A Voice More Beautiful Than Blue

I was with my friend Jeff Mansfield, on the porch of a hand-built cabin in Virginia, when I began to realize how little I understood about sound. It was a mild morning two winters ago and we were the only ones awake. The lawn stretched before us, long and rugged, with a single tree in the middle of it. In the morning stillness, Mansfield and I would talk for a while and then return to sipping our coffees and pretending it wasn’t as cold as it was. He was better at the cold, having the broad, sturdy build of a former hockey player. At one point, as I watched the birds that flew in and out of the tree, Mansfield turned his steady blue eyes to me and waved his hand to get my attention. Then he asked me something he’d never asked before: “What do you hear?”

Although I grew up with two generations of deafness in my family and can communicate in Sign, I am hearing. Since I was about ten years old, I have lived almost solely in the hearing world. I’m aware of the wide, sometimes antagonistic gulf in understanding between the hearing world and the Deaf world, one that rests on a foundational assumption: that deaf people cannot access sound without the help of benevolent hearing people. Still, on some unconscious level, this idea operated within me too.

“Birds,” I described, indicating with my hands where they flocked between the tree on the lawn and distant trees, their songs traveling back to us. “And, over here, machines, construction.” From the road beyond the tree line, clanks and grumbles broke through the morning.

For a second I was pleased with myself, but I quickly realized how empty my descriptions were. I had skipped over the most interesting elements of the sounds, instead identifying what was producing them: a bird, a machine. Birdsong, in my hands, had only birds, over there. It had no song.

The truth was that Mansfield, despite being profoundly deaf from birth—or because of being deaf from birth—knew more about certain elements of sound than I did. To me, sound was simply a thing that came through my ears. It was an unexceptional part of the everyday, the humdrum. I listen to music on headphones, I respond when someone yells my name, but I don’t think much about the meaning contained in sound. Mansfield’s life, though, is largely dictated by it—not in the conventional sense, but as it ascribes social power. “Imagining a deaf person’s relationship to sound is challenging,” he writes in a text about a workshop he taught in 2013, “not only because deafness implies a...