It’s not just those with a visual impairment that use spatial awareness—we all have it and can develop it to our advantage at the harp.

As harpists, we know how essential coordination is to everything we do at our instruments. But when you can’t see clearly because you are visually impaired or blind, even reaching a lever or pedal in time can feel daunting. Your hands are moving between the strings, the levers, and the music, and your feet might be moving around on the pedals—there is a lot happening at once. When you try to navigate all of the coordination with a visual impairment, it can leave you wondering if the music you dream of playing is out of reach. I’m here to tell you it’s fully within your grasp, and I’ve learned some strategies that can help students and teachers overcome the obstacles posed by visual impairment.

Honesty is the best policy

The first step is honesty—with yourself and your teacher. Tell your teacher what you can and can’t see. If you rely more on mental pattern recognition than visual cues, that’s not a setback—it’s an asset. Sharing your strategies with your teacher will help you both find ways to use them to your advantage.

Spatial awareness

You’ve probably developed a keen sense of spatial awareness. This is another asset to use at the harp. For me, one of the most valuable exercises has been focusing on a single note. I place both hands on it and feel the string, the space between strings, the space between fingers, and then the space between my hands. That “nothing” in between the strings is just as important as the strings themselves. Now this spatial awareness exercise is part of my daily warmup.

It’s not just those with a visual impairment that use spatial awareness—we all have it and can develop it to our advantage at the harp. Think about how you hit the snooze button in the morning without even looking, or how you can walk down stairs while holding a conversation. These aren’t superpowers—they’re skills we build through practice. I approached the harp in the same way I once learned to type: slowly, deliberately, and repetitively. Just as I had to know my computer keyboard inside out, I needed to know my harp inside out.

Play with your harp

Somewhere along the way, I realized I wasn’t just playing the harp, I was playing with it. I started noticing my body in new ways — which muscles in my hand were engaging, when to release, how much weight to sink into a string. At first, this deliberate practice slowed me down, but eventually I found freedom in precision. I began experimenting with what I call “accidental falling” onto the strings, after being introduced to the idea by my own teacher Katie Wychulis, and also Alice Giles—letting my hands drop naturally, noticing where I landed each time, what worked and what didn’t, and shaping consistency out of those small discoveries. This approach helped me overcome the fear of “missing” due to my eyesight and encouraged me to relax.

Explore like a child

We often say that children learn instruments quicker than adults. Children don’t pick up instruments and worry about perfect placement. They push, pluck, explore, and experiment. Through that play, both the “right” and “wrong” movements get cataloged into their developing brains, ready to be refined later. Adults, on the other hand, often start with careful, precise movements—and learn more slowly as a result. I’ve tried to bring back that childlike curiosity. When I practice, I sometimes ask myself: should I focus on the second knuckle of my right third finger as I close? Or the heel of my hand as I fall? Do I need just a pulse of forearm restraint to avoid replacing one string too high? These thoughts flash through in fractions of seconds, but they’ve built a deep comfort in my body.

Using proprioception

This type of awareness has a name: proprioception. Muscle memory is like the car engine that runs on autopilot. Proprioception is like the car’s satellite navigation and parking sensors, giving you context and awareness. Strengthening my proprioception has made me less clumsy in daily life, and far more confident on the harp. In scientific terms, proprioception is the nervous system’s ability to integrate sensory feedback from muscles, tendons, and joints, producing a mental map of where the body is in space. Neuroscientists describe this as sensorimotor integration, and it underlies everything from a dancer’s leap to a surgeon’s steady hand. When harpists talk about “placing,” “hand shape,” or “closing,” we are really talking about proprioceptive calibration. Sighted players rely partly on vision to double-check those movements, but when vision is absent or impaired, the proprioceptive system goes from being supportive to being central to how we move.

I often think about proprioception in terms of how we learn. In motor learning theory, there is a distinction between declarative knowledge—consciously thinking “I move my finger this way”—and procedural knowledge, when the movement becomes automatic. Repetition builds procedural fluency, but awareness makes the process flexible. Knowing not only what the finger is doing, but why the movement works, creates freedom. In this way, learning harp technique is remarkably similar to how athletes train small, precise adjustments, or how typists move from letter-by-letter thinking into whole-word fluency. For me, blindness has forced a deeper reliance on proprioceptive awareness, which may actually offer an advantage: every gesture has to be mapped, felt, and understood at a fundamental level.

These discoveries have been so meaningful that I wanted to connect with others. That’s why I founded The O’Carolan Society for Blind Harpists Worldwide. It’s a space to share experiences, compare teaching methods, and explore approaches like learning by ear, braille music, or even my own method of “synesthetic shape consolidation,” inspired by Carol Kappus’ hand shapes workshop. The organization has a page for supporters and a private group for blind and low vision members.

Every challenge brings a solution if we’re willing to experiment, listen to our bodies, and play with our instruments. For me, that’s freedom without sight. •