The music that uncovers the silence. Challenges for the musical education of deaf people: towards a decolonial horizon

Abstract

Music has been hegemonically understood as an acoustic phenomenon closely related to the structural components of the auditory system and without which it is unthinkable that it can be perceived. Given this, contemplating the possibility that deaf people can experience and construct meanings around this sound art is paradoxical, because if music is the sound that is heard with the ear, those who cannot hear it cannot understand what is music. Hence, the "limitation" of deaf people has become naturalized to hear that, from music education, there are few questions raised to defend music as a fundamental human right. Furthermore, the binary fundamentalisms of deficiency / capacity, normal / abnormal hearing / deaf, constitute a colonial horizon that subjects deaf people to the prevailing power, annulling their being-sound under the dominant assumptions of the ideology of normality that permeate the musical education. From decolonial pedagogies, it seeks to base musical education as an aesthetic-political-pedagogical practice that provokes questions and fractures in the hegemonic conceptions of music, enabling a decolonization of sound, that is, the recognition of the musical capital that the community has deaf and value the hearing difference as the opportunity to discover other musical worlds from the perception, expression, interpretation and particular enjoyment of the sound experience, which legitimize possible skills, intercultural experiences and interest them in the musical field of those who inhabit silence. It is then about proposing a political-pedagogical praxis from musical education that offers possibilities for the social appreciation of differences in a path that is oriented towards justice, dignity, freedom and humanization.