Breaking the Silence: Composing Music for Code of Silence
By Dame Evelyn Glennie
Silence is not the absence of sound – it is a canvas. A space waiting to be activated. For me, this has never been an abstract idea but an embodied reality – one shaped by personal experience, necessity, and an ever-evolving relationship with how we perceive sound.
From around the age of eight, as my hearing began to deteriorate, my mother and I would stand in front of a mirror in our farmhouse living room. She would silently mouth words, and I would trace the nuance of her expressions, the shape of vowels, the flicker of intention in her eyes, the quiet choreography of language without voice. These sessions – we called them our “mirror sessions” – were not just practical exercises in lip-reading. They were acts of preservation, of connection, of listening without hearing.
Lip-reading demands more than attention. It requires a different mode of listening – one rooted in sight, in rhythm, and in breath. The rise and fall of a chest, the split-second delay between comprehension and response, the invisible current of meaning that courses through silence. It trained me to hear with my eyes and interpret silence not as a void, but as a language of its own. I use the word ‘silence’ but in fact the roar of concentration to decipher what is said can be extreme.
When I was invited to co-compose the music score with the hugely talented Dan Jones for Code of Silence, a 6 part ITV drama centred around a lip-reading protagonist, the opportunity felt rather personal. This wasn’t merely a creative challenge. It was a homecoming. A rare and meaningful convergence of my lived experience and artistic practice. A chance to explore two of my most intimate languages: the visual articulation of a human face, and the visceral, tactile experience of sound.
Watching the main character lip-read on screen felt uncannily familiar, like seeing my own history reflected back. There’s a distinct quality to lip-reading that’s difficult to articulate to those who haven’t lived it: a kind of hyper-attunement, a microsecond-by-microsecond decoding of intent, emotion, and context. It’s less about words than it is about subtext, and it struck me how this mirrors the act of composing. Music, too, speaks in what is unsaid – in the breath between notes, and the tension held in stillness.
From the outset, we knew this score could not rely on traditional melody. It needed to speak in a different tongue. Texture, rhythm, resonance – these became our primary tools. The brief was to create a percussion-based score, and with access to over 3,800 instruments from The Evelyn Glennie Collection, we stepped into my sound forge with a renewed sense of purpose.
My sound forge is a curated sanctuary of sonic possibility, a living archive of wood, metal, skin, clay, glass, iron, bronze and much more. There are log drums from Polynesia, African udus, stone lithophone from Cumbria, rusted iron sheets, bomb cartridges, and delicate Indian Noah bells. Household items have been repurposed into sound-makers, each object holding its own story, its own resonance and its own value. These are not just instruments – they are voices. There is no such thing as a wasted or unwanted sound in my sound forge!
For Code of Silence, we approached this collection of instruments not simply as composers, but as interpreters. Dan and I weren’t scoring dialogue – we were scoring breath, glances, memory, and the embodied focus of lip-reading itself. We began by recording textures: long, unstructured sessions where we allowed intuition to guide us. In this space, time dissolves. Thought gives way to sensation. We let the instruments speak first, then manipulated those voices, stretching single notes into ambient landscapes, extracting rhythm from the cadences of unspoken speech.
At times, I felt as though I was lip-reading through sound, interpreting the characters’ inner lives not through what they said, but through how they were. Their hesitations, their gestures, their inner thoughts. The score evolved to shadow these elements, sometimes supporting, sometimes interrupting, sometimes simply vanishing, leaving viewers to confront and negotiate silence head-on.
The music doesn’t always align with dialogue. It lives in the spaces around speech – in the uncertainty, in the emotional undertow. In some scenes, it hums like a second language beneath conversation. In others, it steps back entirely, allowing the weight of silence and suspense to take centre stage.
For me, sound is physical. I feel it through vibration, through air pressure, through the shift of space. Sound is something I read, sense, and absorb. Working on Code of Silence crystallised this understanding. The score we created became more than an accompaniment. It became a bridge between different ways of inhabiting the world.
Silence, too, is far from simple. It can be a form of protection, resistance, vulnerability. It can feel oppressive, or deeply peaceful. For those of us who lip-read, silence often dominates but that silence is rarely quiet. The concentration it demands is deafening. Composing this score became an act of radical listening – one that extended beyond the auditory, and into the realm of movement, energy, and emotional resonance.
In the end, Code of Silence gave me a profound creative awakening. It allowed me to tell a story that I have, in some way, been living for most of my life – a story about what it means to listen when sound is no longer a given, and to speak through vibration when silence is misunderstood.
Code of Silence is a 6-part Crime Drama, which premieres on ITV1 on Sunday 18th May 2025