From Harry Styles and Taylor Swift to Froukje: Max Abelen (18) from Boekel makes Tiktok videos in which he translates well-known songs into sign language. Including dances and facial expression. “Because I really enjoy doing it.”
Max didn’t have much to do during the summer holidays. “Then I thought: let me distribute my hobby via social media.” And that is special, because Max is hard of hearing.
Thanks to implants, he can still hear music. “I let music play directly on my implants,” he explains. “That is converted to electric sound and immediately passed on to my auditows. I can understand a lot of it, but it doesn’t sound the way you hear it in real life. A bit robot -like.”
“I let music play directly on my implants.”
Every deaf or hearing impaired experiences music in a different way. That is why he wants to show through Tiktok how he experiences music and, above all, that sign language plays a great role in this. “I want to show people that it is a beautiful language. That can be more normalized.”
The music lover mainly gets positive reactions to his videos. Most of his followers are people who do hear well. “People like to see something like that. It’s new, they hardly ever see anything like that.”
For Max, dancing and translating music is the most normal thing in the world. He starts recording as soon as he understands a lyrics well. “It is more difficult with English songs,” he explains. “Then I really have to read the text and think how I will translate it.”
What not everyone knows: Sign language is not universal. “Spoken language is different in every country. It is true with sign language,” he says. “There is international sign language, but I don’t know them yet.”
His favorite song to play at the moment? Nice with the girls from Merol. “It is a song that almost everyone knows. A nice, cheerful song that you can really swing with in sign language. People like that to see.”
According to MAX, concerts or theaters are best used more signs. “So that the deaf and hard of hearing can get that too.” It seems to him ‘super fat’ to ever be on a stage as an interpreter.
“For the deaf and hard of hearing, it is important that the music world becomes more inclusive, so that they get the music completely. Via sound a lot is transferred,” he continues. “So also emotion, the text itself and rhythm. It is not all transferred if you can’t hear it. If it is made visually.”
