Dame Evelyn Glennie is one of the world’s premier percussionists and has been profoundly deaf since childhood. This episode traces her story from Aberdeenshire, Scotland, where she was born in 1965 and played piano and clarinet before her hearing began deteriorating at age eight, to the school percussion teacher, Ron Forbes, who taught her that sound is vibration and trained her to distinguish timpani pitches through her hands on a practice-room wall and across different zones of her body.

The episode explains the neuroplasticity that let her brain route tactile feedback as auditory information, why she performs barefoot on wooden stages, and how a collection of more than 3,500 percussion instruments serves as a tactile vocabulary. It follows her training at the Royal Academy of Music, her pioneering career as a full-time solo percussionist, collaborations with Björk and Trio HLK, music for the Royal Shakespeare Company and the film Sound of Metal, and leading 1,000 drummers at the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony.

• How she kept a stadium full of drummers in time without an earpiece or click track
• The aluminum aluphone she played during the lighting of the Olympic cauldron
• The 2007 lobbying campaign with James Galway and Julian Lloyd Webber that won £332 million for UK music education
• Her 2003 TED Talk How to Truly Listen, the book Listen World, and her 2022 podcast
• Two Grammys, 29 honorary doctorates, the 2015 Polar Music Prize, and the Order of the Companions of Honour