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 ...