Big Ocean

Right now, the concepts of disability and non-disability are separated, but ultimately, we want to see a world where those boundaries are erased.
~Park Hyun-jin of Big Ocean

For belated Music Monday, Big Ocean, a Korean pop band who is HoH (Hard-of-hearing)/Deaf. I heard about them on my Instagram feed, which thanks to my interest in the Paralympics, is now full of cool people with disabilities. I love that a deaf Kpop band exists.

From an article in The Korea Times by Pyo Kyung-min:

“The three of us have different levels of hearing ability,” Kim says. “During recording, we often struggle to stay on beat because we can’t hear the rhythm of the track clearly. It’s hard to fix this on our own, so we rely on the staff’s hand signals to help us stay in sync.”

“Tuning our voices is also challenging,” Park adds. “We use an app that helps us match our pitch and then we memorise the amount of muscle effort needed to produce each note. It’s not easy to remember the muscle tension required to hit the right notes, so we focus a lot of our training on that.”

...For choreography rehearsals, they use a smartwatch-style metronome that provides pulse feedback through vibration, along with a visual metronome on a monitor that helps maintain rhythm with light cues.