Thoughts about music, communication and voice

• When I've really hit it off with my partner during a tanda/dance, it sometimes pops up in my head that he and I "hear the same music" as if this is the rarest and most revelatory of all things. I guess because I think there are infinite "musics" to be heard in any one piece - depending on how you notice and interact with the rhythm, the instruments, the nuance, the lyrics etc. Sometimes, hearing somebody else's music is an amazing experience and opens me up to possibilities I'd never imagined - these are the great conversations - but that experience of knowing one other individual hears the same piece is oddly breathtaking This more than any proficiency of steps is what makes dance transformative for me. A partner can absolutely butcher his physical interpretation of his inner music, so long as I feel it within him. 

• I have a naturally soft and sing-songy voice. I read somewhere that such qualities are generally associated with higher degrees of empathy in individuals. I'm not sure how solid this relationship is, but I find that often when I am forced to alter my speech patterns because people are having difficulty hearing or understanding me, it changes my perception of myself in the coversation and my reactions to my interlocutors. I feel a greater distance between myself and the other when I speak like this and am often less patient and more rational. Perhaps this is more related to it being a conscious speech choice requiring more concentrating to maintain, although the reverse connection of these moods and those tones is certainly inevitable. Considering that we can induce emotions from the expressions we hold on our faces, I wouldn't be totally surprised if the way we intone also affects our moods. 

• In relation to that: Because I am a terrifically contextual person (the hallmark of a true introvert, I think), I can have a very different voice depending on my concept of "my role" in a given situation. When I dabbled in theatre, I was always the actor who did *not* need to be miked (I also had quite the stirrings of a Wagnerian boom to my mezzo when I studied voice) and when I am the authority figure, I manage to speak clearly, succinctly and audibly. In some contexts I am "loud" and boisterous.When I am most soft-spoke, it is a signal of intimacy. When I know somebody remotely well, I tend to understand them far more through their patterns and pitches (as well as context, body language, etc.)  than the words they say and so I expect that these others also will intuit my meanings instead of parsing out my individual words.I feel oddly uncomfortable when people do parse out my words in these contexts (something easily read on their faces), it puts me on my guard. As if our shared speech is a specimen to be dissected instead of a harmonic in the music of our conversation - meaningless taken outside of the whole point and counterpoint. 

• Instead of going out (got one of them there colds) on New Year's Eve, I found myself obsessively scouring Kafka on the Shore. It's funny, because I'd downloaded it while my mom was in the hospital and had gone through it a few pages at a time fairly contentedly until SMACK about 20% through, the storylines start to connect, at which point the whole thing became impossible to put down. Anyways, I would like to go through it again more closely, as there's a lot in there that a first-read can't grasp, but I did like this quote about the title song of the story: "Symbolism and meaning are two separate things. I think she found the right words by bypassing structures like meaning and logic. She captured words in a dream, like delicately catching hold of a butterfly's wings as it flutters around. Artists are those who can evade the verbose."