Deaf Anthropologist is the sound and research practice of Hamburg-based artist Gaetano Rago. He is researching how the severe sensorineural hearing loss he has lived with since early childhood shapes hearing and perception and combines ethnographic methods with experimental sound design. Working with modified tape machines, looping systems, and custom Max patches, he explores how sound transforms and distorts as it passes through machines, memory, and the brain. He works primarily with dancers and visual artists and is part of the international collective Exposure Therapy, which explores the politics and poetics of auditory experience.

DEAFMIRROR is a browser-based hearing simulation engine. It applies frequency-specific attenuation derived from a clinical audiogram (30.01.2025) to any uploaded audio file, allowing listeners to experience sound as filtered through sensorineural hearing loss — with and without hearing aid approximation. No installation required. Everything runs locally in your browser.

ORIGINAL — unprocessed signal. WITHOUT AID — full unaided loss applied. WITH AID — NAL-NL2 approximation of hearing aid gain, with residual attenuation remaining. Switch between modes while audio plays to hear the difference directly.