An interview with artist, scholar, musician Frank Mondelli and their subversive re-imagining of the hearing exam
Image courtesy of Adobe
CommonsDr. Frank Mondelli is a UC Davis postdoc and historian of the material culture of disability, sound media and pop culture in 20th century and contemporary Japan. I had a chance to sit down and talk with them about their project Words in Noise (2021), a five-track 15 minute musical EP you can listen to here (or below).
The EP is quite short, each track abstracting a different hearing exam from the “Pure Tone exam” to the titular “Words-in-Noise exam,” layering in striated jazz chords, found sounds from the hearing exams in question and its fair share of colorful characters, from doctors to the artist themselves. We experience each track as someone going through “routine” hearing exams, prompted for comprehension and speaking as the tracks oscillate between medical prompt, music and controlled chaos. From start to finish, Words in Noise subverts, probes and questions its listeners — after all, it is an exam.
For me, Words in Noise represents a sonic “counterattack” of sorts against the archival erasure of Deaf voices, a singular and oft ignored experience of how a hearing exam could be felt. The EP is as musical as it is informative, subtly embedding critiques about medical diagnosis and hearing centrism amidst (for lack of better words) sick beats.
It is a thoughtful glimpse of an academic stepping outside their comfort zone to tell a different kind of story. More than a tool to promote empathy or education among hearing audiences, the narrative speaks of Mondelli’s experience being hard of hearing and as a scholar of disability culture and Deaf studies.
In this interview, edited for clarity and length, we work through their creative process and the theoretical backbones of such a project.
Julie Fukunaga: Could you talk a little bit about making your EP Words in Noise and how it originated?
Frank Mondelli: The longer I’ve been in academia, the more I’ve come to value personal and creative expression. I came to this in the middle of my PhD program. After I passed [my oral exams], I thought, “Man, like the only thing I’ve been doing with my life is just studying” — and working really, really hard to understand other stuff, of course, in preparation to contribute [to academia]. But I thought, “Wow, I really need a creative outlet.” I turned towards music as a way of doing that.
And at first, I didn’t have any desire or ambition to make original music. I just wanted to learn how to play the piano. But then as I got to Japan in 2019 to do my dissertation research [on the history of technologies for hearing impairment in Japan], I was getting really inspired by my archival work, which fits in, of course, with the history of testing hearing and electronic standardizing what counts at Deafness versus what does not. Part of the reason I was doing that research in the first place is because I myself am hearing impaired. And I have a history with hearing exams myself — of course, at a very different time and place from my research.
And I wanted to creatively think about what it means to be tested from more than just a historical, archival theoretical point of view. And so for my EP, for each track, it is each track represents a different kind of hearing exam, telling a loose narrative that’s more or less based on my own life.
JF: Could you talk a little bit more about how archival work shows up in this particular project? What are some of the different tracks you’re using, the different voices you’re using?
FM: So in terms of archival work, as a very rough rule of thumb the further back in history you go, the less and less you’re going to bump into Deaf voices. I was spending a lot of time with voices of people presuming to talk for other people’s experiences. I feel like we as disabled people often run up against [that].
For example, the academic Allison Kafer in her book, Feminist Queer Crip (2013), for example, talks about notions of “disability futures,” [in the context of] futures that non-disabled people tell disabled people that they have. This could be quite a violent act. It could be quite invasive, it could be uncomfortable. And I feel like that’s tied in with a lot of testing culture, in terms of testing for hearing and such. So I think, again, rather than rip stories from my archival work and make songs about them… it was feeling, “Man, I just I want to hear a Deaf voice.”
You can sometimes get at the Deaf experience through reading in between the lines. And so for the EP most of the voices you hear are not my own, they’re doctors or other children, other kinds of sound effects, other kinds of disordered voices. I wanted to both represent the fact that [you can] “hear” a Deaf voice in the midst of all that noise, but I also wanted to flip that around by the end of the EP as well and center my own voice and center one Deaf experience. And I try to be very clear that this is one person’s experience and only one aspect of one person’s experience as well.
JF: At the end, you start asking questions of the audience. To define particular notions of disability studies, or ask if they understand these words, and [ultimately you] invite the audience to find that information and to “join us,” which I think are really compelling last words. I’m curious if you could talk about how you embedded your own voice throughout the process of creating the EP.
FM: Sure. I really struggled with what precisely I wanted to say at the very end. And it was funny because writing the other doctor characters was really kind of easy for me. But then, when you write in your own voice and you’re talking to the audience directly, it feels really important to get that right. I go back and forth on how effective I was at the end of the EP, but there was one thing I knew I wanted to do, I wanted to perform a test myself.
I don’t wanna just give another hearing test at the end. I want to queer the exam, or I want to subvert it in some way, and I want to really take part of the spirit of the exam, but use it in a way that is inclusive and inviting of a wide audience. So in some ways I’m very nice to the listener at the end. I think it’s, it would’ve been very easy to strike a more angry tone, strike a more confrontational tone. I think that has a time and place for sure. You often don’t get social stuff done without making people uncomfortable at best, and really uncomfortable further on.
JF: How did you make decisions regarding who to curate the experience for and where, if at all, to include sort of explanations or education for hearing, for able-bodied audiences, for people who may not share these experiences with you?
FM: I try to be really guiding to the listener. It’s a short EP, about 15 minutes. About one third of that is much more experimental music, and that comes right in the middle of it. It’s like the main showcase of the EP, which is the pure tone test part.
And so in this case, lots of people may have taken hearing exams, but those experiences might have been so unremarkable that they barely remember how they worked. So the explanations of each test at the beginning of each song is a way of making it very clear here’s how this exam works. If I had just been making the EP for myself, for example, I wouldn’t need those kinds of explanations. But they’re there to help the listener understand even when the music gets abstract.
JF: [Probing] more about how you included these moments of discomfort or antagonism for audiences who would engage with the work: One track that jumps out to me in particular is track four — the Words in Noise Test, where you’re asking [the listener], “Can you say isolation?” “Can you say seclusion?” “Insecurity?” and having these really uncomfortable feelings droning out into nothingness. I’m really curious about your artistic decisions there.
FM: I think in terms of artistic decisions, you know, it’s funny ’cause growing up when you take some of these exams, a lot of the words that they make you say are mundane, like “boat” or “rabbit” or “dog.” But I have distinct memories of being so unsure what those words are and straining and struggling to hear.
I’ll speak only from my own experience. But when you’re uncomfortable, when you’re feeling isolated and somebody is saying something to you and you have to strain and struggle to interpret it, it’s almost like your brain sometimes goes towards the words that describe the emotions you’re feeling. And then when you do interpret, it can be something that’s almost revealing about yourself and your own feelings, which is of course prompted and partially created by the environment you’re in.
Another aspect of it in that track, Dr. Marigold says something to the effect of, “It’s not whether we understand you. It’s whether you understand us.” And that I felt I also wanted in that moment both the representation of the test taker’s emotional experience, as well as a representation of what the whole institution is working to do.
At the same time, I use a lot of distortion, I use a lot of audio effects on my voice, on Dr. Marigold’s voice. I also bring in a sound of a crowd as well because that’s what the Words in Noise Test in particular is supposed to be. It’s like a cocktail party test. And so I wanted to accomplish both confrontational … but also surrounding that with music that at least I thought was pretty or interesting.
JF: Whether pulling from this project or any others, what does it mean to you to center Deaf identities and experiences in your own artistic work?
FM: I would say within [the last 10 years of] disability studies, it’s been becoming even more exciting recently because we’ve, we’ve started getting lots of concepts that really are about the world from a disabled person’s point of view. One recent academic term that’s come up more recently is the “Disabled Gaze” or “disability gaze,” which is a play on words like male gaze or non-disabled gaze. There’s “Deaf gain,” which I think is about five years old now as a term. So many people focus on hearing loss, but what do we gain from Deafness as well? [And] “aesthetic access.” Rather than focusing on stuff like ramps for buildings, aesthetic access is more about what happens when disabled people are given tools of creative self-expression and are less shut out of things.
And again, I’m speaking only to my experience even within the Deaf world. I’m not a native signer. I didn’t grow up in the capital “D” Deaf community as well. So my perspective is, you know, quite different. We all have individual perspectives, which is exciting. In my work, I wanted to center my own experiences, but gesture towards larger institutional relationships with social, political, cultural moments in society.
This piece is part of Immerse’s 2023 issue centering disability innovation in documentary and emerging tech — presenting perspectives from artists, activists, scholars and technologists at the vanguard of storytelling and disability justice. You can find other featured stories and more information about the issue here.
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