There is a common misconception that deaf people live in a world of silence.
But many people who are deaf retain some hearing. Some, such as Australia's former Prime Minister John Howard, make successful careers in a world full of noise.
This also includes the music industry.
Increasingly, the music world is recognising that deafness doesn't stop people from loving music as much as the hearing community. In fact, there are many deaf musicians.
One of the highest profile artists today is Dame Evelyn Glennie, a Scottish percussionist and composer. She has collaborated with many musicians including Icelandic singer Björk and former Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett.
During the 2012 London Olympics, Glennie led 1,000 drummers to perform in the Opening Ceremony.
She's performed as a soloist with the best orchestras in the world, and released more than 60 albums ranging from concertos for percussion to improvisations with folk and pop bands.
In her latest project, Glennie is exploring the sound world of people who are deaf alongside poet Raymond Antrobus.
While Antrobus, who is also deaf, read his poems aloud, Glennie improvised on pre-selected percussion instruments.
"The whole thing really was pretty much one take recorded live right in the moment," Antrobus tells Radio National's The Music Show.
The result is a seamless blend between spoken word and music, showing what's possible when two people really listen to each other.
Busting the myth of total silence
Glennie started to lose her hearing when she was eight years old, becoming profoundly deaf.
This means she can hear sounds such as someone speaking, but without additional aids, the sound quality can be distorted and the volume reduced.
Glennie uses a combination of visual cues and a refined ability to distinguish musical pitch through a learned pattern of vibrations.
"Hearing is basically a specialised form of touch," she explains on her website.
"The low sounds I feel mainly in my legs and feet and high sounds might be particular places on my face, neck and chest," she says.
Glennie shares some of the visual cues that musicians use that help her predict what's going to happen when she's performing as part of a group.
When a violinist comes down with their bow in an aggressive manner, chances are they're not going to play softly. Or a percussionist might make a big gesture before an especially loud bang.
Antrobus makes the point that many people experience deafness as a spectrum. For instance, he has high frequency deafness.
"[High frequency sound] just doesn't exist to me at all," he says.
But with therapy and a lifetime of training, he says he has "a very scientific way of understanding acoustics and sound."
Both artists are skilled lip-readers, something they use in their day-to-day lives including The Music Show's interview.
"People listening to this are probably going to hear two deaf people sounding very fluid," Antrobus remarks.
When he's communicating in virtual spaces, digital hearing aids connected to a computer produce live captions, which, along with high definition vision of people's faces, help him communicate seamlessly.
Creating deaf-friendly spaces
Glennie and Antrobus met through English music producer Ian Brennan, who suggested the pair collaborate on an album.
"It was just simply Raymond and his incredible voice, Ian with a fairly compact set of microphones and then myself with a few little objects on the floor," Glennie says about the setup.
But to collaborate successfully, they had to make Glennie's studio in UK's Cambridgeshire a deaf-friendly space.
"We positioned ourselves whereby we could see each other," Glennie says.
They also made sure the microphones weren't blocking anyone's line of sight, and that nothing was obscuring their lips if they were reading from paper.
These adjustments were vital so that Glennie could catch the nuances of Antrobus's voice and respond to his poetry by improvising with percussion instruments.
Antrobus says that he was reading some of the poetry for the first time while recording with Glennie.
For Glennie, the secret to the recording's success is simple:
"When you're communicating with someone, you're opening up all of your senses."
"It's not just what is said [but] how it's said, and those nuances [made] their way into the record," Antrobus says.
Opening up the sound world for deaf audiences
"[Our] culture in general takes sound for granted," Antrobus points out.
Perhaps the irony for most people is that the ubiquitousness of sound means we tune out a lot of what we hear.
"We should not confuse hearing and listening," Glennie remarks on her website.
"Hearing is a medical condition, whereas listening is an act of choice."
Glennie points out that deaf people are in an interesting place right now with technology opening up more and more of the sound world.
"We're finding lots of different ways that people can connect more with music," Glennie says.
"Sometimes it's through visual patterns and haptic gear, and sometimes it's watching and hearing."
In the process of making Another Noise accessible for deaf audiences, Glennie and Antrobus created different formats of the album to suit a person's hearing range.
The pair recently performed live at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, an event which was attended by deaf audience members.
Their work to make the album more inclusive and accessible will continue, Glennie says.
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