A proposal by Morton Warnow.

ACHIEVABLE. Real music delivering an emotional, spiritual experience for deaf people that is as powerful and uplifting as the experience hearing people enjoy when they listen to aural music.

We are on the threshold of major changes in the welfare of deaf people. Affordable communication equipment is now available to help produce significant improvements in the employ¬ment, English literacy and communication capability of deaf people. Manufacturers will produce even better and less expen¬sive communication equipment than the usable equipment we have now. Not only will deaf welfare undergo remarkable change, but Deaf Culture itself will undergo change.

The terrible societal problems which have plagued the deaf commu¬nity for so long can now be defeated in our time. But the future will be brighter for other reasons. The spiritual and artistic needs of deaf people will be fulfilled by truly wondrous things which can happen, as follows:

Deaf people will be able to sit back and enjoy, but really enjoy, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony or any of the musi¬cal works of Bartok, Mahler, Verdi, Saint Saëns or any musical work, including country music, spirituals and rock! This can happen. Deaf people can see music unfolding on a screen!

It is true that deaf people can’t hear music. But who says they can’t enjoy music? Here’s what’s up ahead after the problems of employment and literacy are solved by the use of face-to-face communication equipment.

We have the technology to reproduce music as a new, large, fulfilling artistic visual experience for deaf people that will be unlike anything ever done. What I have in mind is a new artform that will emerge from the marriage of engineers, scientists, musicians and artists. These people, as a team, will produce new electronic equipment that will trans¬form the sound of a lone violin or a lone trumpet or a full orchestra in a presto movement into colorful visual imagery in motion on a large home viewing screen.

Deaf people will be able to watch a Beethoven symphony and en¬joy a new artistic, emotional, and spiri¬tual experience. We have the technol¬ogy and the talent to accomplish this right now. Such equipment could be called the “Music Interpreter.”

But after a “Music Interpreter” becomes avail¬able, then what? What’s next? A natural result flowing from this development will be “Music Appreciation Courses” for deaf people. Such courses will teach deaf people to identify the relationship between the trumpet, for example, and the image produced by the instrument as it appears on screen. A music appreciation course will teach deaf people to pick out the first violin section while a symphony is in progress, or the male voices when watching Handel’s Mes¬siah unfold on a screen.

There’s no reason in the world why deaf people should not have music in their lives. It’s even conceivable that up ahead we’ll see deaf compos¬ers writing music for known, established instru¬ments and seeing it played back on a screen— and hearing people enjoying music composted by a deaf person on a stereo!

I see a future for deaf people vastly different from what they’ve known. They may be thieved of the ability to hear, but deaf people are sensitive and intelligent and can grow, and there’s no reason in the world why, in our day and age that is so abundant with new available tech¬nology addressing so many problems and creativeness, they shouldn’t be given every chance, every opportunity to enjoy new ex¬periences as much as anyone else. We’ve got the tools and the talent to accomplish these things now.

Concerning the above discussion, music-to-visual recording companies may well spring up and compete with each other by offering their own versions of a Beethoven Seventh or a Brahms Second Piano Concerto or the Star-Spangled Banner! Deaf people will then have a choice of music-to-visual recordings for home viewing— and they’ll learn to discriminate as to which recording of a particular composition they like best!