Sing it loud

The Janine Roebuck interview was first published in February's issue of One in Seven, RNID's membership magazine. Become a member of RNID to receive One in Seven magazine every two months.

"I was at the supermarket and I couldn't hear what the chap at the checkout was saying to me and I said 'Sorry?' and he sighed, eyes heavenward, twice, and I was toying with the idea of throttling him" – she giggles – "and then I thought, how could he possibly know? I said it's not that I'm not paying attention, it's that I'm deaf, and he was mortified then, and couldn't help me enough. So we must remember that we're not wearing a flashing neon badge and people are not mindreaders. We do need to express our needs in a non-aggressive manner." And she laughs. And this is opera singer Janine Roebuck all over, always finding the best side of things.

She relates another story when all the passengers disembarked from a train she was on, but she couldn't hear the announcements so didn't know which platform to go to catch the next one. "I was shocked at how vulnerable I felt."

Janine Roebuck comes to meet me on a freezing road by a south London railway station, driving up in her yellow Honda Jazz, her hair a pretty reddish colour, a CD of opera singer Anna Netrebko in the car, all colour and warmth. We go into her house, four cats waiting for us.

It's a privilege, seeing inside someone's house, and tells you as much as the conversation you have. Janine's living room is on the second floor, and is in perfect order, no clutter, but also very comfortable. The bathroom signals that this is the home of a glamorous, grown-up woman, with its array of classy potions, and the home of a woman living alone, because there is not a masculine accoutrement in sight. Her whole house, indeed, is strikingly feminine, with its soft pale sofas and long-haired cats, and feels like a retreat from the urban grey of Vauxhall.

If you're looking for angry, if you're looking for someone noisy and radical, you've come to the wrong place. Janine Roebuck is more of a practitioner of quiet diplomacy.

Familiar with, and unthreatened by, the whole gamut of deaf culture, from BSL users to newly deafened people, she is interested in campaigning for change for people with hearing loss. To that end she is the newest Trustee of RNID, getting elected in November. She will focus in particular on the Don't Lose the Music strand of RNID's campaigning which is about making sure people know how to protect their hearing while enjoying music. She wants to be a "hands on Trustee," she says.

"I am interested in all deaf issues from the cradle to the grave. My father was deaf and I noticed, when he was dying, how poorly the elderly were treated in hospital and that is engraved on my brain as something that needs to be addressed. His aids were whistling so they just put them in a drawer. I went round the ward and most of the old people were confused [because] their hearing aid batteries weren't working."

Sing when you're winning

Before becoming an RNID Trustee, Roebuck started working with Music and the Deaf, the renowned charity run by deaf musician Dr Paul Whittaker OBE who was accepted to read music at Oxford University only after being turned down by 12 other universities – despite having passed Grade 8 in three instruments. (The organisation promotes music and the arts among people who are deaf or hard of hearing.) Roebuck and Whittaker's work, which is ongoing, focuses on teaching deaf primary school children how to sing.

"Singing is a means of expressing the core of who you are, expressing the intensity of all your feelings, joy and sorrow. " I used to adore music as a child, it is very uplifting, almost a spiritual experience. So to deprive children of the option [of making music or singing] is very sad." She wants deaf people to get more involved in singing, not to feel they can't take part, and thinks they haven't always done in the past due to low expectations. "We are raising the bar."

She is also keen to support people like her who go deaf later in life. "Someone who goes deaf later in life can no longer function in the hearing world and is not really welcome in 'Big D' deaf culture. Then there is the stigma – you think people will think you're stupid. I've experienced a lot of these issues myself. I know what I'm talking about, and for the areas where I don't know what I'm talking about I'm like a sponge, I want to soak it all up."

When not working with Music and the Deaf, Roebuck is performing – preferably Italian opera or Gilbert and Sullivan. She has sung the title role in Bizet's Carmen on a nine-week tour of the Middle and Far East – "the best tour of my life" – and performed the role of Thisbe in Rossini's Cenerentola at the Royal Opera House's Linbury Studio Theatre in Covent Garden.

But all of this nearly didn't happen.

Roebuck was born hearing and at Manchester University, where she read French, sang in an opera group. But she started to miss words in lectures and took a hearing test. The audiology professor who ran the opera group told her that she should sing while she could, because she'd never have a career in music. Roebuck, who knew she had a good voice, was crushed. Her deafness, she was told, was progressive. And yet she didn't give up. She went to the Royal Northern College of Music, keeping her deafness a secret, lipreading and standing close to singers or an orchestral musician singing or playing the same notes as her in the more difficult parts of a piece. She kept mum when she went to the Paris Conservatoire, and the National Opera Studio in London.

But at the age of 28, soon after she debuted at the now-defunct New Sadler's Wells Opera, she felt her deafness worsen. It got to the point where she was stressed about being in tune and struggling in noisy rehearsal rooms. So she got her first hearing aids.

Tuning up

Roebuck didn't publicly admit she was deaf until May 2007. She is reticent on whether she got less work as a singer after this revelation, saying she is just glad to be in work, but one wonders how the music world reacted. In any case, she is developing a new career alongside her singing, as a reiki healer and animal communicator, a method of helping sick or distressed animals through intuition. But singing is still her main focus.

So, how does this mezzo-soprano tune up? She does singing exercises, like all singers do. But there are pitfalls peculiar to a singer with hearing loss. For example, altering technique in order to hear herself better has proved unhelpful, as then the sound didn't carry so well to the audience. And sometimes, when anxious, she cranes her head a bit forward in order to hear the accompaniment better, but this tightens the skull and naturally any tension in the body is undesirable, so she has learned – with her teacher, established Welsh tenor Arwel Treharne Morgan – to rely more on sensation and trust her technique.

Listening to yourself too much, she explains, is bad technique, as no one perceives how their voices sound accurately anyway. And relaxing is important. Singing should be pleasurable and breathing as natural as possible, she says.

Also, Roebuck finds it easier to hear her accompanist if he plays an octave below where her hearing loss is less severe, but adds that it helps that she had perfect hearing when she was born. She has adapted gradually over the years. It is much harder to learn to sing if you are born deaf, she says.

Looking back on her own experience, she laments the lack of information that is available to newly deafened people when they get hearing aids – about products, about RNID, or just that people don't always know they can return to the audiology department for fine tuning as they adapt to their new aids.

Now, however, Roebuck is fully informed and technologically savvy. She lipreads automatically "in order to survive" and uses privately-bought Oticon Epoq in-the-ear hearing aids, which work with Bluetooth technology. She uses loops in the back of a taxi or sometimes in theatres, though she finds they are often not turned on or maintained so are of no use. She loves theatre captioning, which she says has transformed her life.

And suddenly it's time to leave, as she has a hearing test in the afternoon, and is then preparing for her next performance in January. She will sing at an RNID awareness-raising and networking event held by the advertising agency, M&C Saatchi. It will be a night at the opera.