Hearing and touch: the two senses every string player should develop

Playing a musical instrument is, at its core, an act of perception.

It involves two senses: hearing and touch.

That’s it.

Seeing is important for reading music (and walking around), but when it comes to playing, it often gets in the way.

Sight can be a trap.

For example, what looks like good posture can actually be a terrible posture. Violinists who are standing straight, neck upright, seemingly balanced and symmetrical, yet struggling with tendinitis, chronic pain, and all sorts of physical problems is sadly commonplace. 

Looking in the mirror to see if your bow is parallel to the bridge can certainly be helpful. But eventually, it is much better to feel and hear the angle of the bow on the string than to see it.

(A side note: there is a difference between seeing a static position and seeing movement. Watching the quality of movement—birds flying in the sky, dolphins swimming through the ocean, jaguars running—is immensely valuable. Their movement has direction, elasticity, effortlessness. Those qualities can teach an instrumentalist much more than a frozen image ever could.)

So becoming a better player is, to a large extent, about refining hearing and touch.

Hearing and touch for string players are not secondary skills. They are our most immediate contact with the music.

1. Sharpening your hearing

Imagine you have a microscope between your ears.

Your mind.

No matter how much you are hearing already, there is no limit to how much more you can hear.

Here’s an exercise: Walk down the street and notice the sounds around you. You can count them if you want, but you don’t have to name them. (In fact, I think it’s better not to, to prevent expectation creeping up.) Choose one sound that catches your attention. Zoom into it. Hear its micro-vibrations. Its texture. Its shape. What colour is it? Don’t think too much. Choose the first thing that comes to mind. How does that sound resonate in your body? How does it feel?

Magnify it in your imagination.

If it’s a long squeak, make it a landscape.

Every sound has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Don’t flatten it. Sound doesn’t exist on a page. It unfolds in time. It has depth.

You can go even further. Zoom into only the beginning of the sound. Then zoom into the beginning of that beginning.

There is always more to hear.

2. Sharpening your sense of touch

Violin and viola playing are made of micro-sensations.

Movements so small that you can barely, if at all, see them.

Take whatever movement you normally make, and make it smaller.

Then smaller still.

Experiment with complete stillness.

You quickly discover that one movement refuses to stop: breathing.

Observe it.

Like the sounds we explored earlier, breath has a shape, a direction, a depth—almost an intention.

Allow it to become slightly rounder. Slightly softer.

That same softness can gradually find its way into your fingers.

With the left hand, magnify the tips of your fingers where they meet the string and fingerboard.

Imagine each fingerprint becoming as large as a globe, about a foot in diameter.

As the finger approaches the string, follow this progression:

Tiny dot (as if playing harmonics) → Small circle (a little more finger weight) → Large circle (the string resting against the fingerboard)

When lifting the finger, feel the same process in reverse:

Do it slowly.

At least three seconds on the way down.

Three seconds on the way back up.

Yes, it requires patience.

But this is one of those things that appears to be a longcut, while actually being a shortcut.

Violin playing is full of paradoxes like this.

Again and again, what feels like the slowest path turns out to be the fastest one.

Your nervous system cannot be rushed.

It learns through clarity.

It learns through attention.

If you feed it the right information, and enough of it, progress takes care of itself.