Glenn Gould (1932-1982). Canadian pianist whose recordings of Bach (especially the Goldberg Variations) reshaped twentieth-century classical music interpretation, and whose specific cognitive and sensory profile is one of the most thoroughly documented in performing-arts history. Gould had severe sensory sensitivities that made concert performance increasingly intolerable to him; he abandoned the concert stage at thirty-one and spent the rest of his career working exclusively in the recording studio, where he could control every parameter of the sonic environment. He sat on a low chair his father had built for him, sang along with his playing (audible on every recording), wore winter clothing in summer, washed his hands compulsively, and lived in near-total social isolation in Toronto. The work that emerged from this carefully engineered sensory environment is among the most precise and intellectually rigorous in the recorded literature. His cognitive signature is the discovery specialty operating in a domain that rewards exactly the kind of attention he could sustain — and his withdrawal from concert performance was not weakness but a successful redesign of his working environment to match his architecture. The integration partner was Columbia Records and the recording technology of his era, both of which made his particular working method commercially viable for the first time in performance history.