A dog barks at something, but a cat's miaow directs attention to its desire. Humans, even with the least intentional gesture, assert or transmit something of themselves into the space surrounding them. It could be called mana, this spontaneous distortion of the ontological field around each person, a certain unspoken demand for attention which exerts a definite force, weak or strong, positive or negative. Above a certain intensity we would likely refer to it as charisma, but why not extend this term to the entire spectrum of force of personality, from the least, or even negative, to the greatest? Although it can operate silently this force is best understood through the modality of sound, since the effect survives in sound recordings and is particularly powerful in songs or the various forms of popular music such as hip-hop, where it is mundane enough that it can be technically manipulated and re-created. All of this class of sounds are inhabited, invested expressions of self as aural energy, and are quite different from the kind of energy aroused by the beauty in random environmental sounds like the lapping of water or the wind in trees, or even cars passing on a road. It is only human voices which can evoke this incantatory magic and threaten us with its power, although an echo of it remains in the sound of musical instruments, especially those which approximate the timbre of the voice. Imagine a mature adult first hearing a church organ or a violin! It is likely that our own thoughts, in so far as they are silently heard, share in this phenomenon of surplus intensity, and in this way come to seem to be expressions of varying selves, normally bracketed together as one. On the verge of sleep one can sometimes hear one's own thoughts as if in the voice of another, and presumably in dreams this potentially plural investment is taken to its natural conclusion.