What if two musicians playing together could do more than just see and hear each other? What if they could also physically sense each other's movements? When two people perform a collaborative task, such as a violin duet, they rely primarily on sight and hearing for coordination, and cannot rely on physical contact. Yet, physical contact is crucial in social interactions between individuals: just think of a violin teacher who, when teaching a gesture to a student, doesn't simply demonstrate it by performing it, but grabs the student's arm and guides them through the correct movement. Through physical contact, the body can receive and transmit information related to movement, and it can do so even more effectively than previously thought, as a new international study demonstrates. published in the prestigious magazine Science Robotics and to whom the March 2026 cover.
I study, coordinated by the Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome, sheds light on this issue by demonstrating that haptic feedback – the sense of touch and physical forces – can improve coordination in precise motor gestures, such as playing the violin in a duet, even more effectively than sight and hearing, which musicians traditionally rely on in performing the gesture. Coordinated by teacher. Domenico Formica, Professor of Bioengineering at the Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome, the project is funded by the European Union with almost 5 million euros under the Horizon 2020 program. This is the result of the European project CONBOTS ("CONnected through roBOTS") which was also attended by the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna di Pisa, its spin-off company IUVO srl, the CNR (National Research Council), the University of Newcastle (UK), and the University of Ghent (Belgium)..
To replicate physical contact between the two violinists in a scenario where this is typically absent, researchers from the CONBOTS team developed a pair of wearable exoskeletons For the upper limbs, they can sense the movements of the two violinists and, when they don't coincide, apply forces proportional to the difference between their movements. In this way, the exoskeletons allow the two musicians to virtually connect, allowing them to physically sense their partner's movements, simulating direct physical contact.
The system has been tested with twenty pairs of violinists, including ten amateurs and ten professionals, who performed a piece of music in four different sensory conditions: hearing only; hearing and sight; hearing and haptics; hearing, sight, and haptics. The musicians were unfamiliar with the exoskeletons and were not told they were physically connected. The results showed that the presence of haptic feedback significantly improves motor coordination: Violinists were able to align their arm movements more precisely, synchronize their bow positions better, and achieve better musical coordination.
Surprisingly, the force feedback provided by the exoskeletons improved coordination more than just visual feedback, although violinists are normally trained to rely on sight during duet performances. The best performances were recorded when auditory, visual and haptic have been combined, highlighting the role of themultisensory integration in complex sensorimotor tasks.
The results of the CONBOTS project They suggest that haptic feedback may represent an effective communication channel in collaborative tasks between individuals due to its implicit nature. Unlike visual cues, which require conscious attention, haptic feedback is bodily and immediate, allowing partners to adapt to each other's movements in an almost reflexive manner. Beyond music, this approach could have a broader impact on numerous collaborative activities, including motor learning, for example.
"We are entering an era where robots can mediate physical communication between humans in entirely new ways. - adds the professor Domenico Formica dell 'Research Unit of Neurophysiology and Neuroengineering of Human-Technology Interaction (NeXTlab) UCBM. “This study is a first step toward systems that physically connect people, enhancing their coordination, learning, and rehabilitation.”
"Haptics, or tactile and kinesthetic perception, provides information in a fundamentally different way than sight. - explains Francesco Di Tommaso, postdoctoral researcher at the Advanced Robotics and Person-Centered Technologies Research Unit (CREO Lab) of the Campus Bio-Medico University of Rome and corresponding author of the study - It's physical, direct, and immediate. Our results suggest that the human motor system can integrate this information very efficiently, even in highly skilled artists."
"These wearable robots - says the Professor Nicola Vitiello, Rector and head of the research group at the Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna who designed the exoskeletons for this experiment -They could support collaborative training, motor learning, and even rehabilitation, where therapists and patients could be physically connected."
“It's a breakthrough in our understanding of the corporeal nature of human interaction with music.”, concludes the Professor Emeritus Marc Leman, former director of IPEM-Musicology and the Art and Science Interaction Laboratory (ASIL) at Ghent University, where the tests were carried out. “Perceiving each other’s movements during musical performance enhances the synchronization of shared temporal tasks more powerfully than expected, opening the way to applications beyond music, into domains that may involve coordinating actions over a distance.”
