As a pianist I spent many hours practising the connection between my touching and my listening, adjusting the pressure and weight of touching the keyboard to elicit just the right sonic texture in a note. As a composer I have spent years exploring the connection between my embodied act of notating and its potential sonic reality. Both these endeavours are acts of honing cross-modal activity. As I continue to qualify my experiences of sound and working with sound through language in instances like this – writing about my practice – I find myself constructing an increasingly complex and expanding web of linguistic gymnastics, in an attempt to explain, explore and grasp the slippery subject of listening.