 Good evening and welcome to this British Library online event as part of our Beethoven season and our season of sound. I'm Katie Hamilton, and I'm here in the Beethoven exhibition at the British Library. It's my very great pleasure to be your host for this evening. Tonight's recorded rerun took place at the British Library Knowledge Centre Theatre on the 14th of December, 2017. And it was originally conceived and delivered at the Cheltenham Science Festival the same year. It's a wonderful talk in two halves. And in the first, you're going to hear from Professor of Neuroscience, Dr. Sir Colin Buck Lakemore, who gives us an insight into the power of the senses and in particular, of course, the sense of hearing. And then in the second part of the talk, Dame Evelyn Glennie, one of the world's leading percussionists, is going to talk about her experiences of creating music as a deaf person. Unfortunately, Professor Sir Colin can't be with us tonight, but we're very excited to be joined by Dame Evelyn, who's going to be available to answer questions after you've watched the film. So in order to ask your questions, just scroll down below the video and you'll see a box where you can input your question and submit it. Once we've watched the film, I'll be back on your screens talking to Evelyn and we'll get through as many of your questions as we can by the end of the event. So many thanks again for joining us. Evelyn and myself will be back with you in a little while, but for now, enjoy the film. Welcome to this conversation. As John said, it's a replay of a discussion that Evelyn and I had at the Cheltenham Science Festival a few months ago. We've got a longer period of time this evening, a little bit longer. Also, both of us have forgotten what we did then, so this is going to be entirely new. And I thought that perhaps the best way of setting the scene was to give you a boring lecture, but a very short, boring lecture about hearing, because there are a few things that you need to understand about hearing in order to grasp the full extent of Evelyn's capacities to respond to sound, to feel sound, essentially without hearing. We'll have a chance to discuss in the conversation what is left of Evelyn's hearing. It's not completely gone. No. You hear a little, but it's quite clear that most of her appreciation of what we would call sound doesn't come through her ears, which is hard to understand, hard to believe, but let me perhaps make an analogy. We use the word taste to describe our experiences when we eat food. The implication being that the impressions we're getting are from our tongue, and it feels as if they are. When you taste food, it tastes good, it's in your mouth, and the feelings are in your mouth, but almost all of the sensation is coming from your nose, from smell. And you could tell that by how bad food tastes when you've got a cold or something that blocks the circulation of air up into the nasal cavity. So we're not necessarily good at knowing where our sensations come from. So we use the word hearing to describe what we hear, but I think that all of us are using other sources of information to understand sounds in the world, sounds and vibrations, and we'll hear more about that from Evelyn. It's obvious to all of us that our senses, vision, hearing, touch, smell, taste, are important to us. They are our way of understanding the world around us. We have these distinct words, vision, hearing, smelling, touching, and so on, which relate to particular sense organs in the body. It's odd that we still, and it's not surprising that we use those words because we distinguish the experience of these different sorts of sensation very distinctly. To hear something, to hear a sound is just somehow completely different from having a touch on the skin or seeing something. Even though most events in the world generate more than one sensation, if a car drives past you, it makes a noise and you see it. But you can distinguish the seeing of the car from the hearing of the car, even though both of them belong to the car and both of them are part of the overall experience. You'd never confuse, have you ever had the experience driving at night along an unfamiliar, poorly lit road and you see in the distance something on the road? You look at it and you think, well, could it be a fallen tree? Could it be an animal? Could it be a person? And you adjust your behavior, you slow down as you're approaching this thing. Finally, you draw up to it and you see what it is, maybe a tree that's fallen. But when you are seeing that thing but don't know what it is, you don't know what you're seeing, but you know that you are seeing, you're not at all inclined to say, well, I'm not quite sure whether I'm seeing that thing up on the road or whether I'm hearing that thing up on the road. There's no confusion between one sensory experience and another, yet in the last 20, 30 years, psychologists and neuroscientists more and more have found that the senses combine in the brain and there's enormous crosstalk and interaction between the different senses. I showed you this picture from Robert Flood who was a 16th, 17th century mystic and he illustrates rather beautifully here the notion of the common sense, it's as an Aristotelian notion originally, that the different sense organs, the ears, the eyes, and so on, all send information into a structure in the mind with different components of that structure dedicated to each of the senses. But then somehow in the mind, this is Aristotle's idea, the things are combined together into a common sense. And isn't it interesting we use that phrase common sense to mean intelligence? And in fact, modern brain research suggests very much that our intelligent interpretation of the world is largely driven by the processes of understanding that come through our senses. So it wasn't a bad choice of words. Well, in fact, that common sense as a philosopher saw it corresponds to very much to how we now see the brain working, combining the different senses. I just want to show you a couple of examples. Have a look at this man, watch his lips and listen to what he says. Listen to the sound and watch his lips. Look from one face to the other. Do you get any impression that the sound is different depending which face you looked at? But it's obviously the same sound all the time. You can look from face to face and the sound seems to change subtly. The movement of the lips somehow modifies the way in which you interpret the sound. I mean that makes eminent sense. We are all lip-reading when we speak to other people who are close enough to see. And the kind of lip-reading that Evelyn's capable of doing and our visitor in the second row is only a very extreme version of something that all of us are doing. We're using the visual information from the movement of the lips to supplement what we're understanding from the sound. And the visual information can change our appreciation of the sound. We know where that happens in the brain. It happens in the auditory parts of the brain. There's a direct interaction between visual information and auditory. I'll give you another example. Has anyone here been to the Fat Duck restaurant? No, I have. I have. Well, this is Heston Blumenthal's world-famous restaurant, the best restaurant in the world, two years running a few years ago. And, well, I'll sum up my experience on the way home after arriving, I know Heston quite well and you'll see why in a minute. So he invited me to go with someone else from my institute. And he said, do you know, you really must arrive by 7.30. And we both thought that was a bit sort of uncivilized for a really fancy dinner, maybe 8.30 or even nine. He says, no, no, you must come at 7.30 because we must close by 1.30. Yeah, and that's how long it took. We ate until 1.30, 19 dishes or something. It's normally 14, but he added a few extra ones. But one of his signature dishes that he's very well known for is called The Sound of the Sea. The dish on the menu is The Sound of the Sea. So when this dish is due in the sequence of extraordinary dishes, the waiter or waitress appears and puts a shell in front of each person at the table. And the earphones are disguised, they're inside the shell. But when the food arrives, he tells you to put the earphones in your ears while you're eating this amazing sashimi of seafood which is laid out on a plate of glass over sand and pebbles. And what you're listening to is seagulls and waves breaking. And this is not just, you know, a frivolous game. It's based on research. It's based on research that Heston did with a colleague in Oxford Charles Spence showing that the taste of the food is changed by different sounds and that the, not surprisingly, the sound of the sea compliments the taste of seafood and enhances it. Charles also... I'll stop the seagulls. Charles also did a wonderful experiment for which he won the ignoble prize. If you know about this wonderful prize which is given for very clever research which is never going to win a Nobel Prize. And it was for research. It was called... The taste of crisps is changed by the sound of crunchiness or something like that. What he did was to play the sound of eating crisps to people who were eating crisps in different stages of sogginess when they'd been left... when the pack of Pringles had been left open for different numbers of days. And he found that he could restore the apparent crunchiness of the crisps by playing the sound of crunching as the person was eating it. Extraordinary interaction between sound and taste. I'll show you the last example of this... these interactions between the senses. This is a beautiful piece of a little clip of a movie made by Archus Mark, a production company which has won many, many prizes. It's part of a long documentary about the life of John Hull, a philosopher, a theologian, a poet who became blind quite rapidly in the, I think, the late 1980s. He died just a few years ago. But as he was becoming blind and afterwards he made an auditory account on the tape recorder, on a cassette recorder, a kind of documentary of his impressions and experiences. And you'll hear the soundtrack on this, this is the original recording. That's why the quality of the sound is not very good. But he's describing an experience when he's completely blind now, regretting that he no longer has the impression of space that vision gives you, but suddenly discovering that sound can give you the same experience. Just watch the clip of movie. If only there could be something equivalent to rain falling inside the whole of a room So he's just imagining that if he could be surrounded by rain all the time then he would be able to see, sort of see the world again, but through the different sound reflections. Okay, here's the really boring bit, a little tiny bit of, you know, first year medical student teaching. This is what your ear looks like inside. And it's just a remarkable contraction, just an amazing piece of evolution. So the sound comes in through your, what we call the ear, but the interesting bits are all inside. Sound comes in here. And this is something I want to emphasize. All of us who can hear, and some of us who can't hear, have a very rich experience from the vibrations in the air around us, which is sound. Sound is simply a pattern of vibration of air molecules striking the ears or striking the skin, moving through furniture or through the floor or whatever. It's just vibrations. But everything that enters the ear is a single stream in time of these patterns of vibration. There's one line of information entering through the ear at any moment. And it runs continuously in time. But contrast that, it's not like the eye where there's a real image in your eye, lots of different positions and places and brightnesses and colours. The ear has one single line of information over time coming in. These vibrating waves of air molecules. And from that we gain all of our sound appreciation. We distinguish different people, different voices, different objects and movements in the world around us. Listen to a symphony orchestra and each instrument is in a different position, a different distinct sound. Go to a party with lots of people speaking and you can watch the person in front of you that you're talking to, but you can be secretly listening to a conversation that's going on somewhere else in the room. It's as if we have that soundscape around us and we can pick and choose and distinguish all the different sorts of sounds. But all of that information just comes in as this one single stream of vibrations into your ear. It's the brain, of course, which is doing that process of taking them apart. I'd like to talk to Evelyn a little bit about whether she can still do that kind of dissection of different sounds. The sound comes in, goes down the ear canal and hits the ear drum. And inside, beyond the ear drum, is this amazing little articulating collection of three tiny bones which essentially amplify the pressure, increase the pressure at this point here, where the third of the bones pushes in and out, following the same pattern as the sound waves which are hitting it. The sound comes here carrying all the information about voices and traffic and people and instruments and everything, hits here, gets transmitted through here, hits here on another window, another membrane which connects to this thing. And this is our sort of snail shaped structure deep inside the eye called the cochlear. It's three centimetres long but it's wrapped up in a coil, so it's much smaller than that, it's less than a centimetre in diameter. And the real workings of hearing are inside here, some 30,000 little specialised nerve endings that respond to vibration. So, here it is stretched out this is the thing that's coiled up and if we imagine it pulled out the sound pressure waves go in here and there's fluid inside and the fluid communicates with another window here which can go in and out. So as the sound pressure waves hit this point they move the fluid backwards and forwards through the tube following exactly the same temporal pattern, time pattern so the vibrations are transmitted into the column of fluid. But because the structure of this part, these are the hair cells along here, the thousands of sensitive endings because of the shape of this membrane between the two compartments it narrows towards the top different frequencies of sound cause movement of the membrane in different positions. So a very low frequency sound causes all of the membrane to flap backwards and forwards but a high frequency sound causes only this bit to move, the sound, the fluid movement transmits through the membrane in this region alone. So, different parts of this structure respond and vibrate most to different frequencies of sound and that's the basis of how we distinguish everything, distinguish voices, distinguish musical instruments and so on. This is a cross section through that in reality showing these little sensitive hair cells and the different chambers with fluid inside them. So now, could we have the lights up in the theatre? I want to ask for your help could we have the lights on the audience and the projector off, is that possible? Or not? If you turn the projector off, will it still keep the translate? Fine, excellent. OK, so now, if I can go over here I hope this is going to work I'd like you all to help me with a little test of your hearing around the audience. We're a bit too uniform in age for this to be really convincing but no no, we've got some young people that's great. What I want you to do is I'm going to play you sounds, I'm going to play your continuous sound which is changing in frequency it goes from very low frequency incredibly low frequency up to higher and higher and higher frequency takes a minute or two. While it's running I'd like you to hold your hand up if you can hear it and be honest put your hand down when you can't OK, so all of you and just look around the room to see who is still hearing it at the end OK, here we go let me just expand you're going to be seeing the pattern if we can have the projector back on you're going to be seeing the pattern of sound here the frequency of the sound hurts, it means cycles per second so it begins with a sound pressure wave which is vibrating 25 times a second very very low right some of you might be able to hear even that here we go remember, hands up if you can hear it and keep them up put them down when you can't good, that's very good 40 hertz, excellent it's coming in now well, I can feel it the same way you are keep your hands up for as long as you can hear it and you can see the frequency of the sound there we're getting close to the most sensitive part of your hearing, that's why it sounds loud whose hands are still up look, you see believe it or not there's still hands up that's going and would you say there was an age factor there the hands that were last up exactly can we get rid of that so in other words hearing, now can we go back to the powerpoint so what this graph shows is an audiogram it describes exactly what you've just gone through it's showing the amount of energy the loudness if you like needed to detect it as a function of the frequency of the sound remember all of you were hearing down here even 30 hertz or so well, you need a strong sound to be able to but you can hear the human ear can hear even down at those frequencies but you need less and less intensity as you reach the peak of your hearing at about 2 to 4 kilohertz 1000 cycles and then it cuts off very suddenly as you go up and this high frequency limit changes with age we lose some of the hair cells in our ear they become damaged and it gradually regresses some of you were cutting out around 6 kilohertz or so I'm about 8 kilohertz for the moment it varies with age different animals have different ranges of hearing so bats for instance and even mice can hear far beyond the human hearing of even a young child up to close to a 100 kilohertz and fish, dolphins pigeons, whales can hear sounds much lower than what you can hear so a pigeon flying and the sensitivity is very high and very low frequency vibrations very low frequency vibrations of the sound in the air sounds that are produced for instance by storm activity big storms or aircraft travel over huge distances so a pigeon, I calculated that a pigeon in the rocky mountains of the states could have heard the sonic boom of Concord crossing the Atlantic which has a very low frequency component so birds, some birds are very sensitive to low frequency sound so our appreciation of the world is limited by the capacity of our sense organs I just want to finish the lecture by saying that just like taste and just like those other interactions between the senses that I described our ears are not the only way that we can understand and appreciate vibrations in the world around us the ears are very good for sound for air based vibration to transmitted through everything from the stage we're standing on Evelyn was able to detect the sounds if you were watching her up to reasonably high frequencies without normal hearing so we're able to appreciate sounds in other ways and that's done through a variety of other receptors in our body if you look at a piece of skin there's a hair follicle here there are lots of different nerve endings responsible for different kinds of sensation pain and temperature but also mechanical stimulation of many different sorts and these funny things down here deeper in the skin called Pacinia and corpuscles are incredibly sensitive to high frequency vibration they can detect movement of less than one thousandth of a millimeter movement in the skin and these things are scattered through the whole of the body there are also receptors in our muscles and our joints all of which are sending information that we're not really aware of most of us who have hearing are not acutely aware of yet they must be contributing to our understanding of vibrations in the world around us so that's my little lecture now just to finish this is like an audiogram but it's nothing to do with the ear this is a description of a sensitivity of human beings the vibration transmitted through the body so again it shows the amount of energy needed to detect vibrations as a function of the frequency of the vibration and you can see the same basic sort of shape there's maximum sensitivity around about eight thousand hertz but it goes up to a hundred kilohertz the level of hearing of a bat and it goes down way below twenty sort of normal limit of hearing down to as little as a tenth of a cycle of movement so we're actually much more sensitive the range of vibrations that we can detect through our body is wider than the range of sounds that we can detect through our ears but most of us are unaware of that capacity we have it it doesn't normally invade consciousness fully and we think that all of our experience vibration is coming from our ears ok, we'll stop there can we turn this off now then so it makes the yes, it's the conversation better so there's my lecture, sorry to have taken so long it's amazing now we're going to hear from Evelyn I have a question before we get into a conversation is the type of animal whereby the hearing actually improves rather than deteriorates so for example with a bat that relies very much on vibration does their hearing actually improve with age? oh goodness I doubt it because the the change with age is caused by a gradual loss of those little sensitive nerve endings and improvement would imply that you've got more of them but that doesn't happen so I think the only way down the only way is down I'm afraid but the ability of course bats live short lives so they don't suffer from the kinds of problems associated with old age in humans at least not in quite the same way but they have to have specialised areas in their brain to understand the kinds of information that come from those very high frequencies and that bats use reflections of sound like a radar system to fly in the dark and they must have some kind of impression of the world almost comparable to vision it's hard to know what it's like in fact there's a classic philosophical paper much cited philosophical article called what it's like to be a bat where Thomas Nagel considers this question we know what bats can do we can look at their behaviour but we can never understand what it must be like to be capable of seeing with sound which is essentially what they must be doing so over to you Evelyn I wanted to start because I'm quite sure that the audience will be as interested as I was when we first discussed this to know about how it happened tell us your story you were very young absolutely basically I was brought up in a farm and so you can imagine the type of sound world that I was exposed to that combination between nature growing up with animals and also machinery and the responsibility that you had with that soundscape in a way and I think that's really important because when you're in that type of environment you have an ownership really of the sound because if your parents are allowing you to be next to machinery or next to livestock or whatever you're very very sensitive to what is right there in front of you so actually your senses are pretty razor sharp even though you're not thinking that that's the case but it is the case and with that sense of responsibility that you're allowed and free to have it's amazing how in fact all of the senses become in a way this mysterious sixth sense so there's that sort of patience I think in that type of environment that allows you to I suppose listen to the senses so for me I found that from about at the age of six I had mumps and really from the age of eight I began to have real problems with very sore ears so whenever I went outside especially it was windy and things like that my ears would just really thump thump thump they were really sore and of course my parents they said oh you're okay you're fine and it took them ages to get me to the doctor and so on until the school noticed that there seemed to be a difference in the way that I seemed to be in the class I was more isolated but bear in mind that I went to a primary school whereby the whole school consisted of 37 pupils and two teachers so it was very easy for the teachers to tap in two teachers by the way at the school but to tap into each individual so they were very aware of the subtle subtle differences that were happening for me at that age at the age of eight I was not thinking oh I'm losing my hearing and things like that it was just a real bother to have this kind of pain coming through so eventually we well I think on a yearly basis we had an audiologist come in and in those days it was a case of feeding sounds through the ears and you had to move a counter if you heard that and apparently I didn't do well at all in those particular tests and so she then referred me to an audiologist in Aberdeen so and that was really the beginning of getting more tests and really thinking well what actually is happening and for me I think the changes were that less sounds were coming through the ears but those sounds that were sort of disappearing were being replaced by blobs of sound waves of sound or sounds that I could no longer really distinguish so if someone spoke I wouldn't always be quick at picking up who might be speaking or what direction the sound was coming from so I found that really the sense of sight became so crucial things like just falling behind with school work and things like that because it was such a conscious effort to pay attention really to observe and absorb that information and get that message and then act on that and so I found that I became more and more isolated and of course at that time I was playing the piano and that was my saviour quite frankly which meant that I was on my own which I enjoyed but also I was then exposed to this sound landscape that was full of resonance and for those of you who do play the piano or are next to a piano you understand that first of all the body is in a really good posture but also it's just this wide variety of vibration that's coming through realising that actually being connected with that sound was really important and I was able to control that whereas I wasn't able to control all the sound environments if I went outside or if I went into the playing field at school and so on until eventually at the age of 12 I was kitted out with hearing aids and what we called a phonic ear in those days this is old fashioned technology now where it was basically a box that I would wear and the teacher would wear so that the teacher had the freedom to walk around the classroom to give his or her lecture or whatever it may be and however I started and was introduced to percussion from the age of 12 and this had nothing to do with my hearing because I hadn't come across percussion before that age it was just the curiosity of seeing the variety of instruments and I was really intrigued by that until eventually all first year students at the secondary school had to have a musical oral test and I did extremely badly in that and of course the assumption was that I was unmusical so I was sort of bottom at the list whilst other ones who did a lot better were given the opportunity to start playing instruments and I said well look you know I feel so passionate inside about music I do play the piano and I was getting through the grades pretty quickly you know please just give me this chance so you know after a few months eventually I did get the opportunity and it's just one of those situations where as soon as you you pick something up or you just the chemistry is there and that is a form of listening as well it really is though those sticks were an extension of the limbs so I was not exploring sound at that point in time it was just literally that the feeling of the tool in your hands there and the feeling that that body was absolutely you know in the perfect posture to perceive sound really so that was it and from the age of 12 I had a very good which was unusual in those days a very good peripatetic percussion teacher and his name was Ron Forbes and in those days a lot of the percussion teachers were self-taught drummers and although very very well meaning it meant that they didn't necessarily know about timpani or kettle drums or the mallet percussion and the auxiliary percussion such as bass drums and cymbals and customettes and tambourines and whatever so but this particular man did and what was so interesting about him was that he did not allow us to specialize in one particular instrument so a lot of the young lads wanted to play drums but were not necessarily interested in the xylophone or whatever so he made sure and his whole thinking was that well no matter whether you're introduced to percussion or a tuba or the voice or a paper or a comb or an accordion the key thing that links everything like that is sound, is sound so that's it so whether I play percussion or I sing or play the piano I'm creating sound and making this sound meal for our customers so it was very important to tap into what he was about he basically saw all of his pupils as being sound creators first and foremost and in order to do that you have to have some understanding of the structure of music a musical sentence as it were and see that sort of musical story when you're reading a score we read a book, well we read a score and but in order to do that you need tools so in my case it happened to be percussion so rather than most teachers saying well we want you to be percussionist or a real good violinist or pianist or whatever he was saying well what is your sound and so that changed really the whole approach to how I thought about sound but what he did because I was fighting with the fact that a lot of sound through the hearing aids was coming through here and that was really overload so I felt inside I was actually very sensitive as a musician and I understood about the musical structure and so on but I couldn't get that in lined up or in place or projected because of this enormous kind of barrage of and waves of sound that was coming through the ears because the hearing aids were amplifying everything so he and he found that I was just sort of bang bang banging and just playing when I wanted and not listening to other people and so on because I was trying to listen to myself and this was really affecting my sense of dynamics my sense of touch, my balance all sorts of things and the less I heard something the more sound I tried to give it so basically he said one day during a lesson Evelyn take your hearing aids off which I did and he said he struck a timpani and he said Evelyn can you actually physically feel this drum and he asked me to put my hands on the wall of the room and I said yes yes I can, I can feel that so he then lessened the interval of the two drums that he had there bit by bit by bit by bit by bit and the subtlety in the differences was amazing but it went from feeling it from let's say I'm just saying now here to here to then here to here here to here and so on but my listening was suddenly magnified unbelievably and I had that real patience to pay attention to the beginning the middle and the end of the sound rather than just the impact of that sound so as listeners were often affected by the impact only of that sound but the resonance of the sound is where we just it makes a difference between one interpretation and another interpretation so basically it was about listening to the room and that became my instrument not the drum, not the timpani not the cymbal the room became my instrument so how was I going to paint that sound to have its own natural journey in accordance with the acoustics of the room so what it did was that it suddenly suddenly but gradually really allowed me to pay attention to the sense of touch to the sound colour because very often when you start percussion while loud is in the middle and soft is always at the edge and you know those are the two basic colours of the sound colours that you get but that was just that didn't mean anything to me now because I also knew that I could play loud at the edge so what kind of sound colour is that is it a thin loud is it a spooky loud is it a sharp loud is it a threatening loud suddenly all of the dynamics became really interesting as opposed to just loud and they had a description to them and this really allowed me to paint pictures as it were with the tools that I had it was almost like cooking or baking or something like that with really the tools I had and it was a massive massive I mean I'm so grateful for this particular teacher because if I had someone who stuck to well it's always done like this it's always done like that then I may be a very different player maybe not here at all but what he did do was that in my first lesson was that rather than open up tutor book one for snare drum or xylophone or whatever it is the first lesson was Evelyn take this snare drum away and I'll see you next week and so you can imagine as a 12 year old it's like confusion of being in that situation and but with the drum there were no sticks and no stand it was literally this snare drum and the only thing I knew about the snare drum was that it was called a snare drum or a side drum so I got home and my parents asked well what have you got there and I said well it's a snare drum or a side drum and they said well what are you going to do with that and I said I have a clue what I'm going to do with this I don't know anything about this and I've got nothing to play it with and so on. As the week progressed I suddenly thought well I do have something to play it with I thought me you know my imagination I have limbs I can use these and so off I went I started tapping it and scraping it and all sorts of things like that but what I discovered was that if I put it on the floor it sounded like whatever if I plopped it on a bale of straw it changed the sound if I popped it on and while it stones it changed again or on the grass or whatever on a cushion or on my bed whatever and the drum changed it changed and I thought that's really interesting actually this was no longer just a drum that creates a sound with the dynamics this is a drum that's got all sorts of inflections here all sorts of little colours here that I can manipulate if I look deeper into that drum rather than only the surface of the drum so basically the following week he asked me how I got on and I said I haven't a clue and he said Evelyn please create the feel of a tractor he knew I was a farmer's daughter so I thought feel of a tractor so what are we talking about here are we talking about a brand new spanking shiny tractor are we talking about an old rickety tractor are we talking about a tractor with this engine off are we talking about a tractor going up a hill or pulling a cart what are we talking about you know suddenly in my head I had a whole orchestra of tractors there and it was my choice as regards to how I would create the feel of a tractor so not the sound of a tractor but the feel of a tractor so you can imagine it or the brrrrrrr or the stationary tractor so no sound so it was my choice so you can imagine that you're never going to open up a Tudor Book One saying well please create the feel of a tractor so what you will find with perhaps a Tudor Book One is the situation of please stand with your feet slightly apart please hold your sticks whereby they're more or less in a V shape please make sure that your arm is at a more or less 90 degree angle please make sure there's a little bit of space here between your arm and your body and if you want to strike the drum just go off a little from the centre there if you want to play loud and if you want to play very soft then go to the edge so you can imagine if this was the case in that first lesson and I would strike the drum and I'd probably look at the teacher saying is that right is that correct is that good you know asking permission all the time so you can see the difference there and that really had a and has had a massive impact on how I deal with an object and how I look at a room I mean as soon as I walked in here I noticed the raked seating here I notice all of the cushioned seats there the low ceiling the wooden stage so I thought I might be alright but you might have a very different experience to what I'm experiencing so I may feel a lot more being on this wooden stage than you might be sitting on the nice comfy cushioned chairs those of you sitting in the front row will have a very different experience than those of you sitting in the back rows and so on what are your moves what's been going on in your day to day how are you sitting you know it goes on and on and on and on so my job isn't to make you feel this or feel that that's your responsibility it really is but my job is to give you this kind of sound meal whereby you can then take ownership of that and deal with it as you wish so and each performance that happens means that you're in a way giving a world premiere all of the time even although you're playing the same piece maybe a hundred times in your career even more each time it's like a world premiere because I won't have played it in here in this particular room I won't necessarily have played it in front of you so your presence is making it a premiere so so anyway that was that thank you Dame Evelyn Glennie there with Professor of Neuroscience Colin Blakemore filmed here at the British Library in 2017 and we're absolutely delighted that Evelyn is able to join us this evening Evelyn lovely to see you hello Hello thank you for having me It's an absolute pleasure and just to remind everybody at home that you're very welcome to put your questions to Evelyn if there are things that you'd like to ask her either about the film that you've just watched or as we start to chat now all you have to do is scroll down towards the bottom of your screen type in your question and hit submit and it will pop up on my screen here and then we can add it into the conversation so Evelyn I'm sitting here in the British Library in the middle of the Beethoven exhibition and one of the most striking things that we've got as part of this really wonderful collection of manuscripts and diaries there's a tuning fork that was reputed to belong to Beethoven and various other things is a device that allows people who come to the exhibition to experience in a very physical way the same sorts of things that you were discussing in that film of the embodied sound of music namely a bone conductor that we have at the back here where you can rest your elbows on a wooden bar and feel the music through your arms with your hands over your ears and round your skull and I was really taken by the wonderfully eloquent way that you describe the kind of physicality of hearing of listening as well as of playing it struck me very much that one of the things that we talk about a lot when we talk about Beethoven and his hearing is his isolation his social isolation and the fact that that kind of feeds into the idea of the great creative genius who's disconnected from the rest of the world and other composers talking about the very fact that his hearing was not as other people's meant that he could sort of access different realms and so on but obviously he was a musician he was an embodied musician as you are and I wonder you know as a percussionist and as a pianist since Beethoven was also a pianist how do you do you think about the way that somebody like Beethoven might have actually sort of felt the music through their fingertips as it were when it came to for example playing Beethoven's piano music when you were a teenager? Well it's so fascinating and I think we forget that Beethoven really did push the boundaries as regards to stretching the senses and the very fact that he did not have the mod cons as we have now with the varieties of hearing aids cochlear implants and all sorts of things like that and it's remarkable how he really dug deep as regards to how he could connect the body with his instrument the piano and I think although he was losing his hearing he actually became an extraordinary listener because really this was being fed through his system he almost became an extension of the piano and the piano became an extension of his physical being and I think it's fascinating that people today can have that opportunity to rest their elbows you know on a wooden platform and begin to see how the body actually operates and I'd love for these types of things to be used really as educational tools when we're at school to really think about the difference between hearing and listening and because Beethoven he never stopped listening he never tied the two elements of hearing and listening together listening in a way the less he heard medically the more he experienced through the whole body so his body really did become like a big ear like a resonating chamber it's quite interesting when actually you put your hand over the top of a resonator of a marimba or a xylophone or something and you strike the bar and no matter how hard you strike that bar it will eventually choke itself it will it will not give you any more and that is that so it won't give you any more colour any more dynamic it just becomes a thud but as soon you remove your hand from that resonator and strike the bar again the dynamics really spread vertically and horizontally and I think this is what was happening with Beethoven suddenly the sound that was perhaps being registered through this part of the body and through the ear was that now you know really registering in all sorts of directions through his body. It's interesting he talks about when he was first having hearing problems in his late 20s it's quite striking some of the language he uses it's very similar to the experience that you seem to have had that he says sometimes I hardly hear people who speak softly the sound I can hear it's true but not the words and yet if anyone shouts I can't bear it this kind of blobbyness I think you described it as of sound but I also really struck by what Colin was saying about the importance of the visual because we know that when Beethoven was rehearsing his very last string quartets sort of 1825, 1826 shortly before he died he would run rehearsals with the string quartet that were going to be performing them and was absolutely kind of eagle-eyed at their bow strokes at the physical strength and movement that he could see in their arms, their fingers on the board and so on and it struck me also that because he did play the violin you know obviously string instruments are pressed against your body in a very direct way that even the piano even the pianos that he had adapted for him are not so much of a direct physical connection as a string instrument can be that's so true and the thing about deafness is that yes it can be extremely isolating and it can be very deceiving as well because you just imagine deaf people don't hear anything at any time and that isn't the case at all and there can be an incredible amount of frequencies actually that really do stick out and this can really affect your sense of balance and your sensitivity as well so even putting down a cup or a mug or a plate or something on the table you could quite easily misjudge that because you can't quite tell what the sound is going to be and so that sense of touch it's a very strange thing to describe but the eye really plays a part in how much force you put that object on the table so as a percussion player as a pianist and so on and really watching any kind of musician the eye plays so much in what you hear and this is why we don't really enjoy recording so much because there isn't that essential element of seeing the musician play even before a sound is made you know you can get a sense of what that sound is going to be with all of the pre-physical preparation and very often if I'm giving classes or master classes or something to young players instantly as soon as they pick up their mallets and how the limbs move you can absolutely nine times out of ten tell what that sound is going to be and it's fascinating and I think this is just again an example whereby we're all capable of expanding our senses but also allowing our senses to speak with each other so building those bridges and entry points as regards to how our senses need each other so in a way you know there are a lot of high sounds in fact I'm losing a lot of high sounds so I can no longer hear a hi-hat for example whereas before I could hear a hi-hat and so therefore my sense of touch when I play a hi-hat I'm very aware is quite different to how it used to be so the body is a living thing and our senses are living is like a moving river and we have to pay attention to how they function and what sort of messages they're giving us and that really has an impact then on physically how we negotiate those instruments and there is something there seems to me anyway as a non-percussionist that of all the various sort of instrumental groupings that we might encounter percussionists are such physical creatures if you like there's something so kind of choreographic and almost beletic sometimes about the way that you perform you know often you see percussionists performing barefoot so that the whole body is involved and there's a wonderful sense of which I guess is the sort of thing you notice in masterclass is a kind of freedom and fluidity in the body if you're watching a percussionist to flow their way around a group of instruments over the course of a big piece I think that's true and I think that's partly for several reasons the instruments come in all shapes and sizes so sometimes we're negotiating something that is very long and it could be at waist height the next minute we could have our arms up above our head such as playing tubular bells or a multi-percussion setup or we can be in all sorts of different positions but also that our sound comes from our body weight and our sound really comes from our big toe you know it's so important to be well and truly balanced and planted on the floor and allowing almost your feet to be like an elephant you know so you have this great big specimen but actually the delicacy of the feet and how they speak to the rest of the body is absolutely crucial so this fluidity I think comes very naturally for percussion players and we also feel as though we're painting sound because there is such a lot of movement can be but we do need to be careful that any kind of movement we make the quality of the sound makes sense because we have to allow the sound to stand on its own feet because we're not always going to have this physical image or aid or support so if we're making recordings or something there may not be that part that feeds the more information so we have to always be sure that you know what we're physically feeling is true to our own physical body and I think with all of the devices such as sub packs or things that we stand on in order to feel sound or vibrating chairs and one thing or another they're really interesting however the reality of let's say feeling glockenspiels or cymbals or triangles on the upper part of your body doesn't make sense if you're suddenly feeling them through your legs you know which sometimes these devices do and that really affects your sense of balance and so on it's a very very strange thing or if suddenly you're feeling a bass drum through your scalp so it's so important to relate to the sounds that you're creating according to your own body so I may feel something let's say on my chest or my tummy or wherever but someone else may feel it slightly higher on their neck or on their shoulders wherever it may be and that's absolutely fine but there's never usually such a discrepancy whereby we may feel a glockenspiel through our feet must be so disorientating to suddenly find it's coming to the wrong place really we've had a question in from Emily who was wondering about the way that you encountered this wonderful story you told about being given the snare drum for homework effectively and she wonders if that's how you encountered other instruments as well if your teachers sort of set you other instruments in the same sort of way well I think I was allowed to discover put it like that and this was partly because back in the 80s or rather late 70s when I started percussion was that our school didn't have people coming in giving master classes or workshops we didn't have repertoire that we could buy from the local music store and things like that so basically we had to use our imagination as did our teachers so for example he may have given us a bit of Bach or something, a Bach partita and it might in G minor or D minor or A major or whatever it might have been and he would just ask us to take a phrase of that partita and basically it might have just gone and so rhythmically he might have started right out and played that on the snare drum so, well if you on the snare drum you might think it just goes... non-stop but actually what you were saying is what is the feel of G minor and when you think about that you know G minor is not a massively threatening key it's almost trying to be threatening but it isn't really you know not like F sharp minor which is so rich and you know in the dark and things like that and it's it's quite fascinating because once you understand about the ebbs and flow of seeing the phrasing on the page so you're kind of sight reading you're deciding what the feel might be you're you're deciding on the sense of touch on that snare drum so suddenly how you're manipulating the sticks in the snare drum goes far beyond what a teacher can actually teach you they're giving you the springboard but then it's up to you to think what does that G minor feel to you you know and it could feel something completely different to someone else and each time it can be validated you know and that's what's important and that really delves into your natural giving and natural curiosity as regards to how you want to interpret something at that particular time and I mean I know that you're you're very very passionately committed to education sort of musical education as broadly as possible so this kind of is this sort of exploratory work with a given instrument and set of sonority something that you do a lot with your teaching and workshops I love this I think this is a an absolutely essential part for young people to explore for anybody to explore I mean this is what we do as musicians you know we analyze pieces but we we're also exploring all of the sound possibilities and and we never want to lose that sense of curiosity so all of the time even if you think you're playing a one dimensional instrument such as a snare drum you know and you might think well that's all about rhythm you know how can it possibly play a melody but actually when you begin to use different vocabulary and how you're describing sound and how you're describing dynamics I mean how many times during our life have we you know read or been told p equals piano equals soft f equals 40 equals loud what on earth does that mean you know and but when you think about you know something that's really big and present or something that is really threatening or something that is very majestic you know that can be soft or loud you know it really can and so once we begin to explore those sort of things and allowing people to see the instrument as multi-layered it's like peeling an onion you know just looking at the next corner wondering well what would happen if I manipulated like this or that then it becomes a really interesting experience and it allows them to think that they have permission to explore their instruments in their own way that's that's wonderful and I so interesting to hear what you said about language because you know obviously the way that we use language can so affect the way that we then experience music or the way that we then think about a composer and last Beethoven point before we come back because I'm keen to make sure we get audience questions do keep sending them in that you know it struck me looking through the Beethoven literature ahead of this evening and there's some really wonderful and interesting things that have been written particularly recently you know sort of historical medical work being done on what might have caused Beethoven's deafness but also the various things that were done to try and help him and make you know adjusted instruments and so on that when it comes to the narrative of somebody like Beethoven most of what we hear about is the idea of his hearing as a limiting factor that had to be kind of heroically overcome and actually it strikes me that it's only really quite recently that the narrative has started to shift in a way that strikes me as far more interesting which is you know firstly what does it mean to internalize sound and conceive of it in a way that means that you're not entirely dependent on just what you can hear but also the kind of exactly what you've spoken about the physicality of listening the adaptation of his of several different pianos ways of holding instruments against the body some really interesting research that's been done recently by some scientists in the British Medical Journal on the fact that his string quartets whereas his orchestral music there is no there seems to be no evidence that the the kind of range of pitches or dynamics or anything is affected as he gets older and gets further through his succession of symphonies that within his string quartets precisely the kind of reduction of high note partials that Colin talks about in the film does seem to happen in the string quartets and the scientists they simply observe and they don't try and draw any conclusions from that but kind of going back to this idea of embodied sound and the violin pressed against your arm and the cello against your chest and so on um I you know I feel like this is actually a far more fruitful and and human way of connecting to Beethoven as a composer than sort of sticking him up on a a cloud um you know the great tortured hero sort of thing that it it humanizes him but it also reminds us of the kind of the very complex and rich and colorful thing that interaction with this with the sound of music the noise of music what it actually is absolutely and you've just described that so so wonderfully and and you know it really does help to open up what we imagine hearing to be and what we imagine listening to be and if we could do this with all of our senses really it would give us such a different perspective and a different perspective um as regards to how we interact with other people who may be going through certain uh challenges in a way whereby they may be hostage to the fact that heavens I'm losing my hearing that means I'm not going to be able to do x y or z but there is always a way there's always an entry point if we can help each other with how we interact whether it's through the vocabulary we use the language we use um and and creating a shared experience in a way but yes I mean I know in my own instance I've always been attracted to the low end of the piano and even as years have gone by if I'm playing piano duets with my my pianist um you know in he just knows I will be sitting on the left hand side and I just get so much more enjoyment I'm in much more control when I'm in that area that actually I'm not necessarily hearing as far as the clarity is concerned but the feeling absolutely and whereas at the top end I'm really neither feeling or hearing that makes much sense to me or it doesn't give me the emotional appeal so we have to ultimately you know find what is it that gives us the emotion because if without emotion we won't be able to tell a story and I think that when I'm certainly dealing with people and allowing them to explore the sound colours and all the possibilities they can it's so that they can have all of those sound paint brushes as it were uh to to create their story. Fantastic what beautiful images um we've had a um a rather more um kind of up-to-the-minute technological question from from David who's asking about um how it's been the last couple of years being kind of thrown into the zoom portal um and and having to deal with all of these phenomena at a distance and all mediated by technology and what you know whether there have been challenges in that and also whether there have been sort of unforeseen advantages to it. It's a really important and interesting question um because for me and I can only talk about my own situation is that um from a musician's point of view I have gained no satisfaction at all um from perceiving music through a computer or laptop or any means like that so however uh and and that's always been the case so I've never been reliant on any part of that and so it's allowed me really to reconnect with a lot of the instruments that I have in the collection so during uh the pandemic I haven't actually been interested in learning new repertoire or certain pieces of music that I've always wanted to learn but what I have been doing is actually reconnecting with the instruments and almost going back to step number one you know and truly physically feeling without the pressure of having to prepare something for 730 on a particular date um and that's created a a kind of listening that has been just so wonderful to have the time to digest to explore and so on and and it's it's really made me think I need that time I need to to get that time into my schedule is a necessary um part of my growth really um and a continuation of my curiosity towards what I do as a musician so that's been been wonderful but as far as um communication is concerned as we're doing now it's been absolutely essential and historically you know when people used to write letters I would write letters to my parents as a student because I couldn't use the phone and most people were telephoning and but then once fax machines came on the scene I could then live and independently so um and then once emails came about then you know we were all kind of fairly generic in in how we communicated and now with with um uh Skypes and zooms and teams and this and that and texting and you name it you know we're all really communicating in the same way really interesting I sorry I've got my eye on the clock because I'm conscious that we're we are nearly out of time which is very distressing um but I do want I mean really the the question of time seems to you on a lot of musicians uh sort of mentioned if they sort of popped up on social media during the pandemic that actually the the opportunities you say without the pressure of the date that's that's around the corner for which you need to prepare x things then you've got to get on a plane and go to wherever and do the next thing um and we're looking at this fantastic collection of instruments behind you this is an entirely flippant question just to finish with but how many percussion instruments have you actually got well um I spent the the lockdown periods um actually logging every single instrument onto a spreadsheet along with the story of each instrument and the dimensions and weights and so on so we're now a little over 3500 wow so some are small some are big and I'm still collecting that's absolutely wonderful to hear um well look unfortunately we are we are out of time I feel like we could chat for hours because there's so many more questions thank you for those who sent questions in um huge thanks to um professor Sir Colin Blakemore for his wonderful talk and the opportunity to hear it again and also Evelyn of course to you for joining us this evening um and to you at home for tuning in um don't forget that the exhibition is open here at the British Library until Sunday the 24th of April so if you want to come and see those Beethoven artifacts and also try the bone conductor just around the corner for me it's a really wonderful experience and a wonderfully rich collection of items so thank you for being part of this evening's event for the British Library Season of Sound and Beethoven Season and have a wonderful evening good night