What continues as the way an activity is expressed changes?

The manuscript proposes Cross-Sensory Expressive Patterns as a descriptive unit of analysis for following continuity across changing bodily, sensory, and material realizations. A pattern concerns recognizable relations among dimensions of activity — timing, direction, duration, intensity, contact, pressure, and the ordering of phases — rather than any single gesture or sense.

A pattern can be identified across one person’s activities, before another person participates. The paper’s vignette follows a progression from sustained directional contact to a pressure-marked phase as it appears in a child’s oral activity, then in foot movement, then in hands interacting with water.

A practitioner can take up selected relations through a different form — answering movement through voice, for instance. In the vignette, the therapist’s rising pitch, changes of timing, and vocal force take up relations from the child’s activity. The child’s subsequent activity then guides what happens next.

The other participant’s response provides evidence that this contribution has become consequential within the exchange. Recognizing a correspondence and establishing shared participation are related but distinct judgments. Variation helps make continuity perceptible, and it also provides a means of participation.

The manuscript presents a conceptual analysis grounded in a clinical vignette. It distinguishes changes within an encounter from broader developmental changes across contexts and time, and its broader developmental hypothesis remains open for investigation. It does not present a validated treatment protocol or evidence of clinical outcomes.

Autism is a context that makes questions of recognition and participation particularly visible — what happens when participants and observers are attuned differently to the same activity. The conceptual question extends across populations and settings.

The work enters conversations in developmental and interaction research, including those of Daniel Stern; Colwyn Trevarthen and Stephen Malloch; Alan Fogel; Hanne De Jaegher and Ezequiel Di Paolo; Carpendale and Lewis; Moreno-Núñez, Rączaszek-Leonardi and colleagues; Barbara Rogoff; and David C. Witherington.

Musical thinking contributes to its analytical logic — theme and variation, and Ekkehard Jost’s analysis of free jazz — alongside the études themselves. I PAINT = YOU SING specifies what must hold when the medium changes; PUSH THE BUTTON names the dimensions along which a variation can move.