A documentary by Thomas Riedelsheimer. Featuring Evelyn Glennie and Fred Frith. Unrated. Plays Friday to Thursday, January 20 to 26, at the VanCity Theatre

What would it be like to live in a world without sound? It's impossible to know, according to Scottish percussionist and "profoundly deaf" person Evelyn Glennie, who spends most of this movie pointing out the staggering amounts of noise that compete for attention, no matter the state of our hearing.

Directed and edited by Thomas Riedelsheimer, who gave similar treatment to earthwork artist Andy Goldsworthy in Rivers and Tides, Touch the Sound follows Glennie on musical travels to New York, where she plays a timpani in Grand Central Station and beer cans beside a tap-dancing busker; to Japan, where she bangs on plates and cups at a restaurant; and back to school near her birthplace, near Aberdeen, Scotland, to show other deaf students how to relate to music-as she did, when her hearing deteriorated after age eight-through their whole bodies.

There's no doubt that Glennie, who describes silence as "the heaviest thing in the world", throws herself utterly into her work; with her expressive eyes and a variety of vivid hair colours, she makes a striking impression. She is sometimes less impressive when searching for words to explain her acutely felt philosophies of art and life. To be fair, her notions don't always seem well supported by Riedelsheimer, who appears uninterested in her personal story.

Further, his film is structurally burdened by an excess of footage shot in an abandoned German sugar factory, where she decamps, with a variety of instruments, to improvise with experimental guitarist Fred Frith. The material is interesting, but there's so much of it, the director is forced to spread it out over the entire 99 minutes, thereby diluting the music and also disrupting the geographical part of the journey. Oddly, this makes Glennie's world slightly smaller.