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Sean Forbes (pictured) was born into a family of musicians. According to Detroit Make it Here, a Web site powered by Crain's Detroit Business and Detroit Renaissance, Forbes' stepmother is a pianist, his brothers play saxophone and bass and his father and uncle lead the Detroit country rock band The Forbes Brothers.
The odds are likely that Sean would also have some musical genes, and he does -- the 27-year-old Farmington Hills, Mich., resident plays drums and bass. But there is one thing that differentiates him from the rest of his family -- he's been deaf since he was a toddler.
This combination put Sean Forbes into a unique position. As a deaf person who loves and makes music, he understood that other like him probably had the same appreciation for music that he did. Maybe we couldn't hear voices singing, but he could feel the music of instruments vibrating. And we wanted to try to translate the power of lyrics in a way that deaf people could understand.
In 2005, a cinematographer friend filmed Forbes performing American Sign Language to two Eminem hits: "Lose Yourself" and "Cleaning out my Closet."
"When people watch it, they really get the message of the song," he said. "So, I decided that I really wanted to show music visually through sign language."
Forbes posted his videos on YouTube, where they immediately became popular, and Joel Martin, a music publisher in Ferndale, eventually signed on to help Forbes start his own music video company, D-PAN (Deaf Performing Artists Network).
Now, the company signs deaf performance artists from around the country to star in the videos, which are compiled into DVD volumes and sold in stores and online.
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From MLive in Detroit:
