The most important thing about a musician’s sense of touch is that it becomes refined; the more skill a musician has at his or her command, the more sensitive become the fingers. This seems obvious, but the obvious leads in some surprising directions. Skilled, sensitised musical touch reveals something about the loss of those same qualities in the realm of everyday experience – a loss social critics frame by the general term “dematerialisation”. In general, that word refers to the paradox that the modern world is filled with material things to consume, governed by machines for communication and production, yet at the same time the users of these physical things have become numb to what they hold in their hands or touch with their fingers; in everyday life we have become desensitised physically.

Out-of-touch_Lezing-Richard-Sennett