The Tuba Thieves is a listening project that has been constructed through a process I equate to the children’s game Telephone. In this game, a phrase or sentence is passed down a line of whispering participants, morphing through mishearing. In the spirit of this joy surrounding misunderstanding, I have likewise created The Tuba Thieves as a celebration of how I hear, how information and stories transform in my ears, and the imaginative and generative possibilities in this. Everything in the film is rooted in deeply researched sound anecdotes, histories, experiences, and events. I require captions for films, and often feel they attempt to “raise” a Deaf or hard of hearing person’s experience to a hearing experience. I am putting forth the idea of a more effective method: to allow hard of hearing and Deaf people to determine the value system from which captions are developed to best match their own experiences and desires of sound description. The Tuba Thieves is radically shifting the use of subtitles and captions by considering them as a third narrative space equal to visuals and sound.

Ultimately, this film is a meditation on access and loss, and an investigation into what it means to steal, make, lose, own, protest against and legislate sound, and therefore inversely quiet and peace. The history of sound segregations is deeply embedded into the city through the design and mediation of sound. These choices declare an ownership over space and air, how sound travels through these substrates and who is allowed or obligated to hear it.

Alison O’Daniel
The Tuba Thieves