When I think about communication, 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. 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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Within Reflexive Listening, I have come to understand Cross-Sensory Listening as 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 listen for the quality that travels between them, for what the change of form adds, and for what the other 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 enters them 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.

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Cross-Sensory Listening also has its own timing. A response often arrives within a breath, through the body, sometimes before we can explain it. The response then shows what was received. When you answer my movement with your voice, I can hear what you took from it, and my next movement answers you in turn. Listening and responding keep testing and developing what we are coming to understand together.

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Cross-Sensory Listening 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. A movement may receive a vocal response, which the other person takes up through another movement. As this continues, 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 attend to how these expressions work together within each encounter.

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The Playground Approach (ALP: Active ⇄ 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, 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 respond to one another, particular relationships become available to revisit, vary, and develop together.

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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.

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Within the I–YOU–WE–WORLD perspectives, we practice moving between our own contribution, another person’s, the relationships developing among us, and the wider situation we inhabit. Each voice stays distinct while we learn to sense these relations together. Reflexive Listening asks us to sustain this flexibility: 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.