Melting blocks of ice drip from the ceiling. Sounds of wind, rain, and shrieking howls accompanied by rasping trombone pedal tones and wailing clarinet glissandi build to a cacophony of death-noises. ‘Oh, enough local colour’, retorts Hel.

When tools like the stethoscope and electrocardiogram are appropriated for use beyond their intended purpose – for example in music and dance performance – how does the training of foreign users shift the framing of sound, and therefore what types of sounds from the body and apparatus come to be analysed or considered? Can we qualify the difference between a doctor and a composer listening to the heart through a stethoscope? How do the motives and methods of practitioners inform what they hear, and how they touch – to the exclusion of sensory processes beyond their frame of reference? As a choreographer and composer working with heart rate sensors, we do not seek to reveal or represent the invisible workings of the heart. Rather, in our performances and installations, the sonification and haptification of heart rhythms – along with the noise produced by the apparatus and its use – are a means to compose a context for intimate listening and touch between performers and visitors at the edges of appropriateness.

In a 2013 article Claire Chase muses on her dream to commission and premiere the ‘21st-century Density’. This performance demonstrated some of the difficulties with this idea in the actuality of twenty-first-century composition – the Work as it was perceived in the mid-twentieth century is largely displaced; the performer and her body has been rendered visible, her contribution central, and this concert is far more a portrait of Claire Chase than it is of her instrument. But Chase had in fact already accounted for this. ‘Of what will the Density of our time be made?’ she wrote, prophetically. ‘Of osmium? Of signal processing? Of wood? Of carbon? Of flesh? Of air?’

Gwyn Pritchard's music has a restless, pulsating energy that ebbs and flows within a precise framework. One is left with the impression of purposeful craft, which guides the ear with intention and sophistication. His works are complex and sometimes formidable, filled with detail and constructed with great precision.

Muscle Memory is a new record I have made in collaboration with pianist Matthew Bourne (playing Memorymoog) and trumpeter Graham South. Comprising two composed sound pieces, it was released on vinyl in 2017. The pieces are structured around recordings made in the houses of each collaborator, documenting the act of listening to records. The compositions include conversation between composer and collaborators, samples of music from records heard/discussed, improvised instrumental sections, and electronically manipulated materials. Muscle Memory has since been presented to a number of audiences attending ‘living-room’ listening sessions – held in small, intimate and domestic spaces across the UK. Participative listening of this type is understood through Simon Frith and Christopher Small as an inclusive, collaborative, compositional action. The tactility (Mike D'Errico) and ‘objectness’ (David Grubbs) of records is also of importance. This text is a document of that listening experience.

Beckett's 1976 poem ‘Roundelay’ is sung as a Prologue to Kurtág's opera, Samuel Beckett: Fin de partie – scènes et monologues, opéra en un acte, which was premiered at La Scala, Milan, on 15 November 2018. As an opening gesture it recalls Duke Bluebeard's Castle, in which a spoken Prologue enigmatically conjures a world of fairy-tale that simultaneously reveals a psycho-drama (where is the stage? outside or inside?). ‘Roundelay’ is yet more enigmatic but similarly prescient: we are entering a time-space in which the sound of words is as important as their meaning, and where lonely characters attempt to cope with their sense of imminent end, mysteriously near and yet also bafflingly unreachable. The voice itself is also prophetic, sung as it is by the opera's only female character, Nell, who in Pierre Audi's production is only partly visible, illuminated as if a ghost in a spot of light amid the darkness, hovering well above the stage. There is a normatively bleak perspective on gender at play throughout: Nell's other-worldliness and incongruous melodiousness here anticipate her barely acknowledged death and the consequent obliteration of love.

For the Touch Symposium in September 2017, I presented my installation, World to escape to, salty seas to float, based on a poem by Sarah Kelly. I took as the starting point a hidden space behind the words, which through feeling, I converted into a structure combining words and sound, where the audience could create their own work through touching and interfering with items inspired by the sensations the poem gave me.

This article poses the question, what is so great about the body? Recent scholarship has emphasized the concept of an embodied cognition and reminded us of the significance of embodiment in musical performance. Yet, vital as these observations may be, they offer only a limited view of what ‘touch’ can mean. Following the semiotic notion of the index as a sign with a real connection to its object, writers and artists such as Friedrich Kittler, Ai Weiwei, Kenneth Goldsmith and Nicolas Donin have reflected on how the reproductions of the gramophone needle, the calligrapher's brush, the blogger's keyboard, and the programmer's code can trace meaningful points of contact. Examples from my own practice illustrate some of the many possible ways that digital traces can be touching.

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.