Proprioception – the hidden vital sense of music playing
by Miriam Hlavatý. September 14, 2021.
Music playing involves turning a complex structure of written symbols into movement and, thereby, sound. Because of this, it is easy to get an image of the brain as a bright control tower which, after doing the interpreting, sends directions to the muscles of our body, telling them what to do in order to produce the movements needed in order to create the music we want.
But for all its ability to make our muscles move the brain still depends totally on one thing to be able to issue its orders: its ability to feel and sense our body. This sense is called proprioception and it is a sense which should be of great interest to musicians because it plays a vital role in both the physical and the mental act of playing an instrument.
Communication between brain and body
Nerve signals is one of the ways that the brain and the body communicate. In the general understanding of the brain and the body there is often an emphasis on the signals going from the brain and the central nervous system to the body. But like in any good conversation: the signals need to go both ways for any good exchange of information to happen. This is also the case with nerve signals.
If you make a cross-section through a nerve you will see that the nerve includes several smaller parts, nerve fascicles. Inside of these fascicles, we find individual nerve fibres.
A nerve fibre can be either a sensory fibre or motor fibre. The motor fibres are the once which send signals to our muscle fibres telling them to contract. The sensory fibres on the other hand ends in receptors which has as their job to pick up different types of signals from the body and feed these to our brain. These receptors can convey information such as touch, temperature, and certain forms of pain, but also things such as muscle sensitivity, joint positions or sense of movement and muscle fatigue.
The receptors which provide the brain with information about the position of joints and the tension and length of our muscles are called mechanoreceptors, and without their help you would not be able to play, let alone lift your instrument.
Massive calculations of movement
When I am playing my piano, my brain needs to calculate the angles in my shoulder joint, elbow joint, wrist and finger joints in order for my hand and fingers to reach the right key. It also needs to send signals to the muscles which moves all these joints and if I´m playing more than one note it needs to calculate the changes of all these angles and positions based on the angles of the previous position to make sure the transfer from one note to the next is correct.
But if all these calculations were to be done consciously playing music would be a totally overwhelming experience. Therefore, to be able to do anything which involves a combination of several movements, like playing an instrument or riding a bike, our brain creates what is called a motor program where all of the small movements involved in the activity have been transformed into ONE coordinated movement. Anyone who has learned to stand up, walk or ride a bike for that matter, has experienced this process because this is how we are able to move at all. It is also a process which most of us take for granted.
BUT: one of the prerequisites for such motor programs to work is that your brain knows where the parts which are supposed to contribute to the coordination are located. It needs to have a point of reference from which to work. If I am to hit a key it matters for the brain if the starting point of my arm is that it is hanging down by my side or if it is hovering above the keys because those two starting points demands totally different orders to different muscles in the shoulder, arm and hand. Without this knowledge and starting point of preference the brain is in the dark so do speak: it's not easy to move something when you can't locate it. This is the information which your proprioception provides and which is so crucial to the brain.
(Anyone interested in knowing what it is like to NOT have a proprioception can check out this BBC documentary about Ian Waterman – the man who lost his body . Have you ever experienced waking up in the night with one of your arms still a sleep because you have been lying on it? Now imagine all of your body feeling like this from your neck down, then you know a little bit about how Waterman experiences life without proprioception. Fascinating entertainment for all body-nerds.
Training your proprioception
The proprioception is not a stable sense. It can be weakened and strengthened for different reasons. Ever experienced how your movement in general seems less coordinated immediately after getting out of bed? Remember how your proprioception depends on signals from the body to function optimally? Those signals are created through movement, so with less movement, like when we sleep, there is less input from our body for the brain to base its output signals on.
Other things which affect our proprioception are alcohol and chronic tension. When the police have you put your fingertip to your nose to check if you have been drunk while driving it is because alcohol will weaken your proprioception and make it more difficult for your brain to steer your finger to the exact location you want it to go.
Chronic tension will reduce blood flow to, and restrict movement within, our muscles, making it more difficult for our brain to sense those parts of our body. That again makes it more difficult for the brain to send the correct signals when playing and might lead to a lack of accuracy or detail in our playing. Therefor chronic tension in any part of the body, such as stiff shoulders, neck or arms should never be accepted as just another inevitable thing to be endured as a musician (unfortunately musicians tend to have a rather high threshold for accepting pain and tension as part of the “job”).
Rather, in order to deal with any seemingly arbitrary tension in our body which hinders our playing, we need to start learning more about this amazing organism and just what can be done to make it work as optimally as possible.
The body – a work in progress.
For one thing: our body is not “set”. For all its seeming solidity it is more of a “work in progress” and that goes particularly for our nervous system. Accuracy and movement control in playing depends on detailed feedback from our proprioception and our proprioception can be trained just like any muscle. One way to do this is to enhance the input from the body to the brain. How? By training specific movements consciously and to focus on the physical sensation of those movements while we are doing them.
Here is a great Timani exercise to increase your proprioception before starting to play. It is called the DIP tune-up. In anatomy the outer most joint of your fingers is called the Distal Inter Phalangeal joint or DIP-joint for short. It is the joint that is closest to your instrument (unless you are a singer) but it is also a joint which most of us will have trouble sensing or controlling movement in. This exercise increases the sensitivity in this joint and makes it easier for your brain to locate the point of your body and therefor to be able to send more correct signals to the muscles when playing.
1. Bend the DIP joint of your index finger as far as it goes, it should be able to bend to a degree of 90 degrees although that might not be the case for everyone.
2. Gently, with your other hand, stabilize or lock the middle finger joint so as to isolate the movement to happen only in the DIP joint. Make sure that you do NOT bend the innermost finger joint backwards while doing this:
3. Slowly straighten the DIP joint and repeat a couple of times. The bending and straightening should be slow and most importantly: focused: really try to sense the movement and how it feels while you are doing it. Now you are consciously directing your brains attention to the joint where the movement is happening, training your brain to be present in your fingertips.
4. Repeat on every finger on one hand.
5. Place your hands palms up in your lap and close your eyes. Sense your fingertips and see if there is any difference between the sensitivity in the hand that has done the exercise and the other hand.
6. Do the other hand.
7. Experiment with playing something you know by heart and see if you sense any difference in your playing, like more contact with the instrument, more control, differentiation of touch or other sensations.
Decreased sensitivity in the body need not only be the result of physical muscle tension. Certain states of our autonomic nervous system can also lead to a lack of physical sensitivity in the body. This includes common physical reactions related to performance, such as cold and clammy hands and fingers. But also certain types of stress which especially musicians tend to not recognize as stress for very specific reasons.
More about these reasons and reactions and how to work with them in the next article.
BIO
Miriam M. M. Hlavatý is a Timani master teacher, pianist, bodyworker, somatic coach and lecturer who lives in Oslo, Norway. She is trained as a classical pianist at the Norwegian Academy of Music and as a certified Timani teacher at the Musicians Health and Movement Institute in Oslo where she now works as an institute teacher. She holds annual lectures on Timani, Pain, the Nervous system and the Fascia system at the Musicians Health and Movement Institute in Oslo and at the Institute of Music at NTNU, Trondheim. She has given courses and lectures both in Norway and abroad. She runs the company The Listening Experience, dedicated to the exploration of the many cross sections between body, mind and music.
Booking page: www.thelisteningexperience.simplybook.it
Homepage: http://www.thelisteningexperience.com/