  A general formalism is set up to analyse the response of an arbitrary solid
elastic body to an arbitrary metric Gravitational Wave perturbation, which
fully displays the details of the interaction antenna-wave. The formalism is
applied to the spherical detector, whose sensitivity parameters are thereby
scrutinised. A multimode transfer function is defined to study the amplitude
sensitivity, and absorption cross sections are calculated for a general metric
theory of GW physics. Their scaling properties are shown to be independent of
the underlying theory, with interesting consequences for future detector
design. The GW incidence direction deconvolution problem is also discussed,
always within the context of a general metric theory of the gravitational
field.
