Percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie on losing her hearing and becoming a better listener

Read a full transcript of Tom Power's full interview with Dame Evelyn Glennie here.

Dame Evelyn Glennie is the only deaf musician to ever win a Grammy (which she's done twice) and the first person to create and sustain a full-time career as a solo percussionist. Her new album, Another Noise, is a collaboration with the Jamaican British poet Raymond Antrobus, who's also deaf.

Having both lost their hearing at a young age, their work explores language, sound, music and the lived experience of being deaf. The album was recorded 100 per cent live in a single afternoon without rehearsal and with almost every track being a first take. Glennie's parts were entirely improvised without her having prior knowledge of any poem performed.

Among Glennie's many awards and accomplishments, she's also composed and consulted for TV and film, including the Oscar-winning movie Sound of Metal, starring Riz Ahmed. Wary of media representations of deaf people, she appreciated that the film focused on the psychological effects of hearing loss and didn't portray the experience as a sudden, one-and-done event.

"If you put all deaf people in one kind of box, you just think 'Oh, well, deaf people can't hear anything,' she says in an interview with Q's Tom Power. "That's not the case at all.

"Sometimes you're hearing too much of one thing. Sometimes it's this wall of sound that can be quite painful, and then you can't decipher any sound within that sound, and you lose your balance, so you don't know where the sounds are coming from. So you're actually sometimes hearing an awful lot, but it's making no sense."

Listening with your whole body

Glennie started losing her hearing at eight years old. Her school music teacher, Ron Forbes, trained her to listen differently and become less reliant on the ear. "He asked me to put my hands on the walls of the music room, and the walls were very thin in this part of the building," she recalls.

"He did strike a timpani and just simply asked that question: 'Can you actually physically feel that sound through any part of your body?' And yes, I could…. He asked me to take my hearing aids off, and that meant that I heard far less through the ear, but by feeling the sound through the body, I recognized pretty quickly that actually the body is becoming like an extension of the ear. The body is becoming this huge ear in a way."

This experience influenced her perception of listening. In a 2007 TED Talk, Glennie declared that her aim in life is to teach the world to listen.

"Listening is the glue to humanity," she tells Power. "[It's] the thing that creates a bridge between one person and another, whether that is the spoken word, the written word, or whether there are no words, it's that presence."

The full interview with Dame Evelyn Glennie is available on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Interview with Dame Evelyn Glennie produced by Ben Edwards.