In this invited lecture, I present an informal overview of seven years’ research into the design of real-time systems for the creation, manipulation and performance of simultaneous image and sound. This research explores the intersection of abstract communication and interactivity, as part of a more general inquiry into the formal languages of the responsive medium, and of nonverbal communications protocols in cybernetic systems. I present a combination of live demonstrations and video documentations in order to illustrate the various systems, reveal some common threads, and propose some design desiderata.