Yes. Very definitely. Quite often I find myself saying that playing an instrument is more like dancing than playing music to me. (The sound that comes out of the instrument is the reward I get for making the instrument do interesting things.) I guess it's a muscle memory thing. And the physicality of it does seem to be a big part of the enjoyment of it for me. But I do adapt what I make the instrument do in order to produce a sound that expresses what I find pleasing and satisfying to me, musically speaking.

Re: the troat constricting thing. I think you're right. I think it's more the vocal chords rather than the throat. If I'm singing to myself, which I've found myself doing a little bit lately, I use the sound that I hear coming from my voice to tell me if I have the right note, and then I guess I develop a muscle (or vocal chord) memory to tell me how to do it in the future. And I find that I hit right notes much more often if I'm singing along with a recording than if I try to sing on my own.

I have no idea how I know if a note is right or not. But for some reason, I do. So maybe it's not so much a storage of the musical information problem as perhaps a retrieval problem.