Dame Evelyn Glennie is the first person in history to successfully create and sustain a full-time career as a solo percussionist, performing worldwide with the greatest orchestras, conductors and artists. She fondly recalls having played the first percussion concerto in the history of The Proms at the Albert Hall in 1992, which paved the way for orchestras around the world to feature percussion concerti. She had the honour of a leading role in the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games.
Evelyn regularly provides masterclasses and consultations designed to guide the next generation. She is also a leading commissioner of over 200 new pieces for solo percussion for many of the world’s most eminent composers. The film ‘Touch the Sound’ and her enlightening TED speech remain key testimonies to her approach to sound-creation.
Evelyn was awarded an OBE in 1993 and now has over 100 international awards to date, including the Polar Music Prize and the Companion of Honour. Evelyn continues to inspire and motivate people from all walks of life. Her masterclasses and consultations are designed to guide the next generation.
Evelyn is currently embarking on the formation of The Evelyn Glennie Collection. The vision is to open a centre that embodies her mission to Teach the World to Listen. She aims to ‘improve communication and social cohesion by encouraging everyone to discover new ways of listening as proven in her book ‘Listen World!’. We want to inspire, to create, to engage and to empower’.
You can learn more about Evelyn’s work on her website: www.evelyn.co.uk
Mr Morrison is a Consultant Otolaryngologist and Cochlear Implant surgeon, treating children at the London Evelina Children’s Hospital, and both adults and children in the leading London private hospitals.
He trained in Cambridge and at the Middlesex (now University College) Hospital in London and following his appointment as Consultant to St Thomas’ he quickly identified a need there for a dedicated paediatric ENT department to care for both the local and the wider national community of children with not only routine ENT problems, but more particularly the rarer cases of ear disease, hearing loss, and airway conditions presenting from birth onwards.
Some 20 years later, that hospital now boasts an internationally recognised children’s hospital offering treatment and care in all the disciplines across the medical, surgical and intensive care spectrum. The Paediatric ENT department alone now has a team of 7 consultants including cochlear implant surgeons, and training posts with teaching, research and development on an impressive scale.
Mr Morrison has wide experience in complex ear operations to treat mastoid disease, hearing loss, cochlear implant and balance problems in both children and adults, but surgery alone cannot be separated from the patient’s wider condition and needs, and in this respect he has developed and researched the different possibilities and pathways of care and the increasing opportunities in hearing rehabilitation.
In addition to his busy clinical practice, he has held several national posts, most recently as President of the Otology Section of the Royal Society of Medicine (2017-18) and President of the British Association for Paediatric Otorhinolaryngology (2012-14). For many years he served as examiner on the Intercollegiate Specialty Board and was until recently on the Council of ESPO (European Society for Paediatric Otolaryngology). He is a sought-after teacher and speaker for training and research conferences both in the UK and abroad.
Helen became totally deaf in both ears as a toddler, as the result of damage caused by meningitis. At the age of three, she received a unilateral cochlear implant. Despite the profound challenges of accessing education as a deaf student, Helen persevered and many years later graduated from Oxford University (St. John’s College) with a First Class Honours degree in Physiology and Psychology and an MSc in Neuroscience. Helen then began postgraduate research at University College London, sponsored by Action on Hearing Loss and Cochlear UK. She gained her PhD in Speech, Hearing and Phonetic Sciences in 2018.
As a deaf person, Helen has first hand experience of the extremely challenging listening conditions that deaf people endure and how much listening effort (LE) is needed to cope and achieve successful auditory perception during everyday life. Her interest in auditory neuroscience grew from these experiences. During her time at Oxford University, Helen was able to explore the altered physiology involved in the deaf brain, particularly when interacting with hearing technology (such as cochlear implants). These insights led her to conclude that sustained exposure to excessive LE not only causes cognitive overload and over-tiredness but also, alarmingly, has the potential for other negative consequences such as physical and mental health problems. This is because cognitive overload can trigger a chronic stress response in the body.
This motivated Helen to undertake postgraduate research, in an attempt to find a framework for a behavioural measure of LE which might eventually become a clinical test. She felt that there should be some means to assess LE, so that its occurrence and effects could be more closely monitored in deaf people. Her research focussed on cochlear implant (CI) users, because it is recognised that the implant can only provide a sensation of hearing, and that the auditory information delivered is impoverished compared to that provided through normal hearing. This increases the likelihood of CI users experiencing high levels of LE.
Helen’s research findings, using an early prototype of a behavioural LE test, suggested that LE was already high for CI users even in the best possible listening conditions (i.e. with no background noise at all). This appeared to be a direct result of trying to process the degraded sound, because Helen found similar results in normal hearing participants listening to simulations of the same CI input.
These findings have motivated Helen to begin to liaise with a wide range of organisations, which support deaf children and adults, in an attempt to raise awareness of the impact of LE. She is particularly concerned that parents and teachers of deaf children should appreciate the need for continuing support in educational settings. This is because, although bilaterally implanted children often achieve outstanding performance in spoken language (and appear to understand speech remarkably well in noisy conditions), they are still vulnerable to the effects of excessive LE. This vulnerability is because of the additional processing burden imposed by the impoverished sound they hear.
For this reason, Helen is supportive of any intervention that reduces the cognitive load of understanding speech. In particular, she advocates the use of “multimodal” cues. Neuroscience research has repeatedly shown that processing speech is “multimodal”, where information from other senses (such as vision) has an important role for understanding speech. Indeed, although Helen herself is principally “ora/aural” and can understand speech without any other input, she has personal experience of how much her own LE reduces when lip reading and sign supported English (SSE) are added. As a result, she is extremely interested in Cued Speech, because she can see its potential in reducing LE.
Deaf Choices UK has been able to draw upon Helen’s research and expertise to support people’s understanding of the underlying rationale for using Cued Speech, in terms of both neuroscience and cognitive psychology. This theoretical underpinning has helped to provide some academic justification for the use of Cued Speech with babies and children, in their early years and throughout their education.
Nigel Hinton was born in London and educated at Dulwich College. He is the author of over twenty books and short stories and has written for TV, film, radio and theatre. Prior to his career as a writer, he worked in advertising and as a teacher, during which time he wrote his first novel for teenagers. When it was published to international acclaim, he gave up his position as Head of English in a secondary school to concentrate on writing.
He has written a further 24 books as well as multiple short stories, TV and movie screenplays, theatre plays and numerous songs. He has been partially deaf since he was a teenager, so he is enthusiastic about supporting deaf people and the work of Cued Speech UK.
Aside from writing, Nigel’s interests include playing the guitar and the ukulele, walking, bird watching, cycling, music, movies, drawing and supporting Charlton Athletic Football Club through thick and thin. He is married and lives in East Sussex.
Christine is the Chair person of the charity, and brings with her a wealth of knowledge from growing up in the deaf community, as a child of a deaf adult. With NVQ Level 6 in British Sign Language and a rich and varied background in which she has used her linguistic skills in the working world, she will be a vital member of our committee. She currently works ‘Advocacy, Rights and Awareness Manager’ for Deafblind UK, whom she has worked for now for ten years, and has an educational background in both linguistics and law.
