Deaf pair bring music into new age

Try telling Bruce and Lyn Scahill they're inspirational and they'll just laugh at you.
After all, they live a fairly quiet life in a plain brick-and-tile house in a sleepy street in Onerahi, Whangarei.
But what sets the Scahills apart from most is they both have significant sight and hearing loss _ he is blind and quite deaf, she is just as deaf and losing her sight.
Yet they are baffled by suggestions that their ordinary lives could be seen as inspirational.
"I think that's funny," she says; "What's the flap?" he wants to know.
The couple, who met at a conference for vision and hearing impaired people in 1993, moved to Whangarei in recent years.
"The only reason I was (at the conference) was I was a bloody typist for the deafies, reading the screens," he says.
Mr Scahill, 50, with a head of wild grey hair and a woolly beard, constantly cracks jokes, including about his disabilities. The only thing PC about Bruce Scahill, he says, is "purely coincidental".
Although he reads Braille, Mr Scahill says there was a time in his adult life when he couldn't read.
"I'd had a motorbike accident," he pauses, waiting for a reaction. "Don't worry I was a pillion passenger," he adds with perfect comic timing and a laugh.
His wrist was broken and the plaster cast restricted his fingers. "You try dragging three pounds of plaster across a page. It gets a bit difficult," he says.
"Most people can't work us out because we're so off-hand about (their vision and hearing restrictions)," Mrs Scahill, 46, says.
Her hearing impairment was recognised about the same age as her husband's was, at about aged six.
While she was educated in mainstream schools, her husband attended the Royal New Zealand Foundation of the Blind school.
Bruce's fierce independence learned from a young age is something she's appreciating more and more as her sight worsens.
"I don't see the stars. I've never been able to see properly in the dark. I can't see kids and short people."
But she can see things in the centre of her field of vision.
"People can't handle it. I tell them about my hearing loss first because you can't get away with that. People call you and you get classed as a snob (when you don't reply). I used to tell them later that I was losing my sight. People are funny. If you are deaf/blind, people don't know how to take it."
Being blind hasn't held Mr Scahill back. He's had jobs as an assistant projectionist, on Ford's gearbox assembly line and in a mag wheel factory.
These days he's into sound recording. Mr Scahill's hobby and small business is converting old recordings from 78s, 45s and tapes onto compact discs.
He uses a system of antiquated old turntables and newer computer technology _ much scavenged from inorganic rubbish collections.
He relies on old keyboard-based software because new programmes are ``rat controlled'' _ in other words they require a mouse, something Mr Scahill can't manage.
Mr Scahill can see light, dark and sometimes colours, but to him objects are just blobs. But a blob is better than nothing, so when he's soldering _ yes soldering _ he focuses on the blob in front of him.
"The only time I burn my fingers is when I'm doing a splice," he says with another laugh.