When I think about attunement, I am interested in how meaning takes shape while we are taking part. We bring words, intentions, experiences, and expectations into an encounter, and what happens between us can change how we understand them. A pause, a movement, or a change of tone may invite a response we had not anticipated. Reflexive Listening is part of this process: what we notice guides what we contribute, and each contribution opens what becomes possible next.

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This interest grew from Reflexive Music, where sound, movement, image, and other forms of expression can each carry their own line in the composition. A score gives the performers something precise to work with, a "Plan for Planning," and its realization unfolds through their decisions in the moment. Performing it calls for Reflexive Listening: each performer shapes the music they are listening to, together with the other performers, the audience, and the surroundings.

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Cross-Sensory Attunement is listening across forms of expression. A rhythm heard in a voice may continue in the swing of an arm. The pressure of a brushstroke may return as the weight of a sung tone, and the direction of a movement may reappear in the rise or fall of a phrase. I attune to the quality that travels between them, to what the change of form adds, and to what another person can take up from there.

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Synesthesia made these crossings familiar to me. Working with others, I found that each person attunes through their own perception. One person may hear a gesture as rhythm while another feels it as weight or distance. Common ground forms in what each of us can take up and carry on, so the practice welcomes many ways of sensing within the same encounter.

Attunement also has its own timing. A response often arrives within a breath, through the body, sometimes before we can explain it, and it shows what was received. A movement may find its way into a voice, and something of that voice may continue in a new movement, so the shared line grows with each change of form. Listening and responding keep developing what we are coming to understand together.

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Cross-Sensory Attunement opens Reflexive Listening to Reflexive Communication. I use the term Cross-Sensory Communication for the way meaning can develop through responses that take different expressive forms. As these responses continue, we can follow what is being understood and developed between us.

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Words also take part in these relationships. The same phrase can be experienced differently through its pacing, emphasis, vocal quality, or the pause that follows it. A shift in posture or breath may change how we understand what is said and how we answer. We attune to how these expressions work together within each encounter.

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The Playground Approach (ALP: Attune Listening Playground) grew from the music, its scores, and the conditions needed to practice this listening. Within the practice, awareness of our own contribution develops together with our attunement to others. We initiate, respond, pause, join, or separate, and discover how our actions shape the situation. The études give us structures in which to explore these relationships.

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In I PAINT = YOU SING, participants explore relationships between painting and vocal expression. A change in the speed, pressure, or direction of a painted action may invite a change in vocal phrasing, intensity, or duration. We listen for what carries through the response and what the change of form introduces. As participants attune to one another, particular relationships become available to revisit, vary, and develop together.

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Counterpoint and harmony give a musical image for this. In a Bach chorale, each of the four voices sings a line that can be sung on its own, with its own shape and direction. Together the lines form a harmony at every moment, and each harmony leads the voices into the next.

From inside the chorale, I sing one voice and hear the whole. My line is what I am responsible for: its notes, rhythm, phrasing, and direction. I hear my own voice, your voice, the relationship our voices create, and the way they sound in the room. These are I · YOU · WE · WORLD, available together as my attention moves among them. The note I sing takes on a different quality depending on what you sing alongside it. I hear that relationship and adjust my intensity, timing, or phrasing, and you do the same. Our adjustments become part of what we both hear next. This is Reflexive Listening: I listen from within something I am helping to create.

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From this position, FIND · PLAY · SHARE · CREATE becomes a living, recursive movement. While singing, I find something: a tension, an opening, your breath, our balance. I play with how to continue in relation to it. I share as my contribution becomes audible and available for you to join. Together our contributions create a new relationship, which gives us something further to find. All four can unfold within a single phrase, as listening and singing continue together.

In cross-sensory practice, your voice might be a drawing while mine is a sound. I hear my singing while watching your line develop, and you see your drawing while hearing my voice. Each of us perceives the emerging whole from our own position. I carry my voice forward, hear myself within our encounter, and let what we create together shape how my line continues.

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I call the process through which distinct expressive lines enter responsive relationships Polyphonic Joining. Through it, The Space can emerge: the space between people that forms as they listen and respond to one another. Each person brings a particular way of sensing and responding, and what develops between them also shapes their possibilities for continuing.

The OperaGame partiture gathers these relations into one structure. Its recursive process of FIND – PLAY – SHARE – CREATE crosses the I–YOU–WE–WORLD perspectives, so each movement can be taken from another point of view: I FIND X YOU PLAY, WE SHARE X WORLD CREATES… Each voice sustains its own character while we learn to sense these relations together. Reflexive Listening asks us to keep this flexibility alive: listening to ourselves, to one another, to the environment, and to what is taking shape in the inbetween. Through this practice, we compose new ways of being together.

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The relationships explored here, and what can continue as expression changes form, are developed further in Cross-Sensory Expressive Patterns: On the Continuity of Organization Across Its Changing Realizations, coauthored with Miriam Ben-Oz and published in Human Development (2026). The article follows I PAINT = YOU SING and other études through the FIND – PLAY – SHARE – CREATE structure, and invites readers from developmental research to explore these questions with us.