Dame Evelyn Glennie can be forgiven if she sounds a little weary. She has just returned from Ravello in Italy and a performance with the Prague Philharmonia, having a couple of days earlier made a mad dash to the airport from Buckingham Palace, where she accepted her DBE for services to music.

Even something as important as an investiture needs to be shoehorned into Glennie’s hectic schedule. An honorary doctorate here and a motivational speech there, and she can finally catch her breath. But not for long. Among other things, Glennie is learning sign language.

It is something of a change of heart for the world’s most famous deaf percussionist. In the question and answer section of her website it still states, somewhat defensively, that she has no use for signing as she can lip-read “perfectly”. So why now, after all these years?

“I’ve been curious about it for a long time, but it takes a long time to do,” she says. “I’ve only now thought about what sign language really means, what it is, and what I feel it can bring to my situation.”

Glennie has been profoundly deaf since the age of 12. When she was at Ellon Academy in Aberdeenshire, she spent hours refining her ability to detect drum vibrations. Now she performs barefoot to heighten those senses. She can hear, but the volume is reduced and the sound quality poor. When a telephone rings, it registers as a kind of crackle. She can hear a person speak, but must lip- read to understand the words properly.

“My views have been as a musician and a person who has been deafened rather than born deaf,” she says. “I’ve always been determined to hold onto the oral aspect of communication: my whole profession is about sound and projecting sound and receiving sound.

“In my work, people don’t care whether I’m hearing-impaired or I’ve got one leg. When you’re playing with an orchestra, you’re expected to deliver the goods. I can’t just say: ‘Make an exception for me.’

“I had to get on with it and produce at the highest level. That attitude took over in the past, but your life changes and the choices you make change. I have a different view now, and I think it’s good to keep an open mind.”

Glennie is learning sign language with her office staff. They have British Sign Language posters dotted around the walls and, in quiet moments, huddle around a computer screen memorising from DVDs or online tutorials. Like a musical instrument, learning a new language is easier for children and tough for the average 42-year-old workaholic.

“Like any language, it takes time and consistency and that’s our challenge at the moment because we don’t have consistent time,” says Glennie. “I feel to get a good grounding in anything, whether it’s sign or a musical instrument, you have to immerse yourself in it to get the hang of it. We’re doing it as a team so that we can inspire and help each other. My PA has a very young son, she finds it fun to work with him on sign language even though he’s hearing. He picks things up very quickly.”

When it comes to teaching sign language in schools, she admires the American approach. “In the USA they treat sign language like German or French, and children have the option to learn it at school if they want. I think that’s a really good thing.”

Glennie is making subtle changes to her life. As well as being a musician, she is a motivational speaker and a jewellery designer. She is patron or president of an exhaustive list of charities and heavily involved in lobbying the government to increase funding for music education — her Music Education Consortium with James Galway, Julian Lloyd Webber and the late Michael Kamen convinced Gordon Brown to inject £332m into music education at the end of last year. Now that she’s a dame, she hopes her influence will stretch even further.

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