For Evelyn Glennie, sound is tactile as well as auditory.

A lot of things about Evelyn Glennie stand out: the title of Dame (an honor bestowed by Queen Elizabeth) often appears before her name; she’s widely known as a percussionist but also plays the bagpipes; and, as the media is fond of pointing out, Evelyn Glennie’s also deaf. But somehow the Aberdeen, Scotland-born musician, motivational speaker, and jewelry-maker manages to be more than even the sum of these parts.

Deaf Doesn’t Mean You Can’t Hear
Refusing to be defined by her deafness, Evelyn Glennie has explained that she is profoundly, but not totally, deaf and that she “hears” with various parts of her body.

“Deafness does not mean that you can’t hear, only that there is something wrong with the ears,” Evelyn Glennie writes in an essay on the subject. “Eventually I managed to distinguish the rough pitch of notes by associating where on my body I felt the sound with the sense of perfect pitch I had before losing my hearing.”

Touch the Sound
Evelyn Glennie performs barefoot so that she can better feel vibrations from her instruments. In 2004, a documentary titled Touch the Sound  took viewers on a journey with Evelyn Glennie and explored her sensory world. The film is full of striking visual correlations to the percussive vibrations Evelyn Glennie conjures.

Evelyn Glennie’s childhood aspiration was initially to become a hairdresser. But at the age of 12, she watched her school’s orchestra perform in an assembly and knew it was a world she wanted to be part of. With her teachers’ encouragement, she pursued that dream and today Evelyn Glennie has become a fellow at London’s Royal Academy of Music. She has been nominated for four Grammy awards, won two of them, and now performs more than 100 concerts a year.

She plays up to 60 instruments including the gamelan, xylophone, marimba, and timpani. It takes four hours to set up the instruments she plays in a recital and two hours to strip them all down after the performance.

Providing Music Therapy to Deaf Children
Evelyn Glennie has collaborated with the likes of Sting, Bjork, and Bobby McFerrin and somehow also finds the time to teach and help out the charitable causes close to her heart. She is the vice-president of Hearing Concern and Deafness Research UK and president of The Beethoven Fund for Deaf Children, which provides musical therapy units to schools for the deaf and partially-hearing across the UK.

“'Normally hearing’ people do not define their existence by hearing. In fact, by and large, they very rarely even think about it,” Evelyn Glennie writes in a disability essay. “A common thread amongst the very high achievers that I have met who have a hearing impairment is that they treat their hearing in a very similar manner to the non-impaired. They have at some stage had to do a lot of work to train their voices or learn to lip read, but after a while it becomes second nature and they simply forget about it. Their hearing impairment becomes no more a defining part of who they are than their hair color.”