The Trembling Skin: Learning to Hear Fear through the Erhu

Abstract

How does one learn to hear fear in sound? Taking the erhu as a point of departure, this article examines how ways of hearing are learned and shaped through musical practice, embodied knowledge, material encounters, and cultural experience. It focuses on trembling as both a bodily experience and a musical phenomenon, examining how trembling and vibration move across the performing body, bow, strings, bridge, python-skin membrane, instrument, and listening body.

The study explores how patterns of vibration come to be recognized as expressive and affectively meaningful through learned practices of listening. Erhu performance provides a distinctive site for this inquiry: performers learn to hear and produce subtle differences in vibrato, bow pressure, friction, resonance, and timbre, while learning to articulate what they hear through the language and concepts of musical practice. These ways of hearing take shape through training, bodily practice, cultural memory, and repeated acts of listening. The python-skin membrane introduces a further material dimension, opening questions about how knowledge of an instrument’s material construction may shape the perception and interpretation of its sound.

Bringing ethnomusicology and sound studies into dialogue with embodied musical knowledge and materiality, the article uses fear as a lens through which to examine the relationship between hearing and knowing. It asks how fear becomes audible, how ways of hearing are learned, embodied, and articulated through musical practice, and how new knowledge may transform what becomes perceptible when we listen again.