Suri Jiang
Voice Is Not the Only Language
2025

Moving Image / sound / listening

Voice
Is Not
The Only
Language

Voice Is Not the Only Language

Moving image, sound
2025

Listening / language / memory
London, 2025
Goldsmiths, University of London

Voice Is Not the Only Language began with a question about how I listen.

I have never heard the world in the same way as most hearing people.

I hear through one ear and a hearing aid. What I hear is often incomplete, so understanding does not come from sound alone. I also rely on lip-reading, subtitles, gestures, facial expressions, memory and context.

Voice Is Not the Only Language began from this experience. Through moving image, sound, drawing and different experiments with communication, I started to think about what listening means when hearing is fragmented, and whether understanding really needs to begin with sound.

Figure 1
Sound drawing

Photography by Adrian Joyner

Figure 2
Lip-reading experiment

01 — Sound Drawing

Visualising Fragmented Sound

Pastel on paper
Listening experiment, 2025

I started drawing sound because I wanted to see what I was hearing.

When I listen through my hearing aid, sound does not always arrive as something complete or clear. Some parts are louder, some disappear, and sometimes I only notice small fragments.

Instead of trying to draw what a sound “looks like”, I used colour, lines, pressure and movement to record how different sounds felt to me while I was listening. The drawings became a way of tracing what I noticed, missed or could not identify.

Figure 1
Sound drawing, detail

Photography by Adrian Joyner

Figure 2
Sound drawing, detail

Photography by Adrian Joyner

02 — Sign Language

How I communicate

Sound
Lip-reading
Subtitles
Gestures
Facial expressions
Writing
BSL

Learning a Language Without Sound

I started learning British Sign Language because I wanted to understand what communication might feel like when sound was no longer at the centre of it.

I had spent most of my life adapting to spoken language — listening through a hearing aid, reading lips, watching expressions and filling in what I could not hear. Learning BSL felt different. I was no longer trying to make incomplete sound complete. I was learning to communicate through movement, space and vision

03 — Body Language
Feeling Sound

How I listened

Mouth shapes
Facial expressions
Gesture
Movement
Touch

Listening with my body

Listening does not only happen through my ears.
When sound is unclear, I often rely on what I can see and feel, a mouth moving, a facial expression, a gesture, a movement, or the rhythm of someone’s body.

Over time, these small physical cues became part of how I understand people.

The body fills the gaps

Sometimes I understand a word from the shape of a mouth before I hear it clearly. Sometimes a gesture tells me what a sentence cannot. When I was learning pronunciation, I also touched the throat to feel where a sound came from.

These are not separate from listening for me. They work together with the fragments of sound I receive.

04 — Vibration
Feeling Sound

How I listened

Touch
Movement
Surface
Rhythm
Body

Sound I can feel

Sound does not only reach me through my ears. I can also feel it through my body — through a table, a speaker, the floor, or an object that is vibrating. Sometimes I notice a sound physically before I understand what I am hearing.

Listening through touch

I began experimenting with vibration as another way of listening. Instead of asking whether I could hear a sound clearly, I paid attention to where I could feel it, how strong it was, and how it changed through different materials and surfaces.

From feeling sound to reading the body

Feeling a voice

When I was learning how to pronounce sounds I could not hear clearly, I sometimes placed my hand on a throat to feel the vibration of the voice.

I could feel when a sound started and stopped, how strong it was, and how the vibration changed between different sounds.

Learning sound through touch

Hearing was not enough for me to understand how a sound was made. I learned by combining what I could hear with what I could feel and see — the vibration in the throat, the shape of the mouth, and the movement of the face.

Touch became another way of understanding sound.

Vibration
Touching the Throat

How I listened

Touch
Vibration
Throat
Mouth shape
Repetition