Introduction

"bell hooks said she came to theory because she was hurting. And I, too, came to it for healing. For the power to name the things that cause pain, for the wholeness evoked by the hope that that naming might dislodge that hurt. But in a world that isn’t collectively free—and doesn’t want to be—the privilege to theorize that which causes harm is often undertaken with a respectful distance from its locus. Sometimes, in that naming from a distance, things are lost." (Desai, 2022)

This practice-based PhD calls forward theory but is not theoretical. I have always approached this research with practical questions at the forefront, questions that always revolved around form, structure and especially process of making of new creative works. The point here isn't to become theory or to instrumentalise practice for the development of further theory but merely to understand the artistic work and practice more precisely. As Lauren Berlant states, “these objects [writing, theorising] are nudging you into the possibility of becoming different, of understanding that transformation isn’t only loss but it’s also a space where many structures multiply as conditions of possibility” (Berlant, 2016). 

The collection of theoretical concepts I use in this section and the way I connect them to embodied sensation is done for the purpose of clarifying my ADHD experience when vocalising, when improvising, when attuning to the world through sound. Some of the concepts I draw on such as affect and atmosphere have been useful to me as ‘input’ into the practice – intellectual stimulants that I used to do things differently, to use voice differently. Other concepts such as the ADHD self or the incoherent sphere of feeling I see as ‘outputs’ – conceptual conglomerates that I’ve defined to help articulate what the practice has led me to observe was happening in the act of vocalising and in the compositions themselves. 

What I am showcasing here (in quite a neurodivergent way in which concepts are chained to one another with excited interest), are a few ways in which my body has found out about itself through vocalising/sounding/doing my artistic practice and how it was supported to do so by theory. This is not mere self-discovery (although the idea that the sonic can bring ease/belonging/joy/pleasure and more self-awareness to neurodivergent experience is not to be dismissed) but is done to expose the guts of the experience so that the composition practice or strategies developed can be more clearly understood. 

The core of the experiences I am critically expanding on in this section are attached to what I am experiencing in the middle of the act of vocalising freely, usually for hours. The strategies I employ for these vocalisations are expanded on and refined further in Sonic Drifting and Sonic Sensing Workshop sections where the practical implications of bringing background experience to the foreground through sound or lingering in the space between self and other through humming are developed in practice. These practical approaches are in themselves compositional strategies or sonic strategies that sensitize performers and composers to the power inherent in sound so that it can be used as artistic material/process. 

Some of the nuances presented here are fragile and slippery as they directly challenge metaphysical models that are generally taken for granted as one inhabits the world. In this section a certain kind of precision matters - nuances between where one is, what one is and how one is are questioned as alternatives are presented. What do we gain by thinking or feeling the self as not ending at the physical boundary of skin or being contained within it? What happens if, as attention wonders, we consider what moves with attention to be the entire apparatus of what one is? 

The reason I pause here in the metaphysical is because the specific individual, their embodied performative apparatus, identity and position have been too often ignored when thinking about music composition strategies. As the (research) world has moved closer to reckoning with implications of its colonial past, the questions of who, where and what we are are questions that have sprung up from the ground like bamboo, very quickly and decisively, unable to be ignored any more. Minoritarian angles and strategies to do with gender, race or disability are now seen as valid and valuable for research. In research we call this positionality. 

I use, in this section, the concepts of affect and atmosphere to draw attention to the affective space between subject and object in which I have found my voice to naturally linger in improvisation. I further refine this space through Erin Manning’s use of Duchamp’s concept of the infrathin, homing in on the generative yet confusing experience of being affected by that which should have been cut from the essence of an experience, that which should remain in the background, yet in my neurodivergent vocal improvisation can become foregrounded.

I also bring focus to the idea of an ADHD self as a traveling self that moves around as stimulating sensation calls, a self that does not end at the edge of the skin but that blends with that which is outside itself, extending, reaching and becoming-with the other. This ADHD self is enabled/supported by vocal improvisation to manifest its impulses without constantly correcting or blocking them, giving in to external stimulants. I also draw attention in this section to the perils of dismantling selfhood too quickly in attempts to focus on a borderless relationality and the importance of practical strategies to tether the ADHD self to a sense of ‘home’ through sensation. I speculate on the power of voice to offer sensory tethers that reinforce a self sensing that in my ADHD vocal improvisation has been particularly supportive. 

Traveling through the incoherent sphere of feeling

Affect and atmosphere have been deeply theorised and are essentially philosophical concepts that have been ‘mapped to the human sensorium’ and ‘constructed as a sphere of feeling and emotions’ (Kassabian 2013 cited in Riedel, 2020). The intricacy of these concepts affords us an opening into the “‘pre-conscious’ modulations of the felt-body in listening situations” (Riedel, 2020). Beyond the analytical offering afforded by these terms, which, when approached logocentrically can become very thorny, they point to an actual ungraspable but felt excess of experience that has been useful for me to attune to as part of my practical sounding act. In the portfolio of works this is particularly evident in the Sonic Drifting approach and the Sonic Sensing Workshop. A comprehensive analysis of affect and atmosphere is beyond the scope of this thesis (for that follow Vaden and Tovinen, 2020; Griffero, 2010, Gregg and Seigworth, 2010; Massumi, 2002, Stewart, 2007) as many of their limits and points of convergence remain under deep intellectual debate and development. I will, however, exhibit a few of the ways these concepts have supported and moved my sonic practice further and how they helped develop the idea of ADHD selfhood.  

The concept of atmosphere supported me in saying no to knowing precisely how or what was affecting me while attuning to constant change, shifts in focus and embodied resonance while sounding. Tethering voice to this felt space of sensation led to a bottom-up approach in which instead of guiding voice to be or do a specific thing, I was learning what voice wanted to express by attuning to whatever was affecting me. 

This whatever was affecting me can be better understood by investigating the sphere of feeling that atmosphere defines. We know that 'atmosphere is pre-objective in that it precedes the observation of separate objects' (Vaden and Torvinen, 2020) and that it 'evades subject-object divisions by constantly dwelling between these two poles' (Vaden and Torvinen, 2020). These were the conditions of inhabitation for voice that I initially used to sound - instead of voicing a precise sensation brought over and held at the forefront of attention, atmosphere allowed voice to move and shift as voice is supported to move and shift by incoherent sensation. This kind of attention is beyond multi-modal as within incoherent sensation the separation between senses becomes obsolete, the senses blending with affects and emotions that make up the experience.  

Over time, as the practice became more refined, I understood that these inklings towards / permissions to sense that atmosphere provided were moulded onto my ADHD impulses and bodily resonances. The sense of lingering in the space in between subject and object, becoming privy to information that resides slightly outside of myself as I am being pulled by sensations that could not be held still are a neurodivergent trait. For ADHD specifically, we know that "exogenous flow [or hyperfocus] is motivated from external sensory distraction, there is rationale to suggest potential causation for a disconnect from interoceptive sense" (Watson, 2024). In my practice, I've conceptualised but also practiced a type of voicing that offers a way to sense in super-position: both inside through felt bodily vibration and outside, at a distance as voice attunes to atmospheres, blurring the boundaries between inside and outside. This atmospheric atunement was the starting point for the erratic to manifest. 

One of the critiques of atmosphere that has been identified in literature is that it cannot “explain why and how different bodies are affected in different ways by the same atmosphere” (Seyfert 2012 cited in Riedel 2020). The initial distance that atmosphere provided from selfhood was generative, it focused the object of attention somewhere in an amorphous sensual space where it felt safe to be in. It also allowed for a certain transmissibility, a confirmation that whatever was there had power to affect others too, which was important when creating artworks and processes of sounding that were to be experienced by other people. This difference in how other bodies are affected also mapped well onto my practice as it became a fascinating creative drive to facilitate this difference and support it to be itself in both performers and audiences. 

Over time, as neurodivergent perception became more clearly focused for this project, atmosphere's limitation in accounting for selfhood became a burden. In the realm of affect and affective atunement, Erin Manning was defining a term that brought even more precision to perceptual experience within the sphere of feeling: the infrathin. Manning (2013) defines the infrathin against Whitehead's concepts of prehension which is 'the grasping-toward through which experience makes itself felt' and negative prehension which is 'what must be actively excluded in order for the event to have consistency' (Manning, 2013). In essence, the infrathin is a way to foreground negative prehension as it "actively backgrounds what is perceived in order to foreground what is not quite within the register of the perceptible" (Manning, 2013). The specific focus on the more-than of experience is a direct nod to neurodivergent perception which Manning herself recognises. This speak directly to the depth of atunement and subsequent confusion when background-foreground become intermingled that has been my experience with vocal performance. I've experienced this both as a blessing - in acuity of feeling of the overall (prehension + negative prehension) perceptual world and a curse - when it has been impossible or difficult to break away from the whole to narrow through a coherent path. 

Knowing these challenges and abilities in this much detail has offered my practice fertile ground to grow in. I detail my strategies for leaning into the pre-objective affective world with voice throughout the discussion of the artistic works. For now I want to isolate a deeper point about ADHD selfhood that brings together the erratic and the erotic. 

Building on Manning's work, Sheena Bernett (2022) talks about direct perception as a neurodiverse queered perception that 'lacks volition and a self' and is ‘danced by lures, directionalities, and swirling qualities’ untouched by ‘constructs such as culture, identity, bodies, and even the senses’ which would require a ‘holding still of all that moves' (Bernett, 2022). While direct perception seems like a more precise way to get into the welter of incoherent sensation through a neurodivergent lens, I have found the move away from selfhood and flesh problematic. Precisely because the power to dissipate within the whole of experience is greater for neurodivergent folk, there is also a bigger risk of dissipating outwards with nothing to return to, becoming stuck. For this reason this research has moved towards fleshiness and embodiment as sensory tethers working with the self's ability to extend and move without dissolving it completely. In this way it aligns with Musser's work on brown jouissance which 'is a revelling in fleshiness, its sensuous materiality that brings together pleasure and pain.' (Musser, 2018). By lingering in sensation, one invests in their capacity to first become familiar with their own sensuous potential, for "in order to have the “luxury” of renouncing subjectivity one must first be a subject: one must be able to express, and act on, desire" (Waterman, 2008)

ADHD self

What does the ADHD self have to offer? The idea of a traveling self, an extended self that is sent out as sensation calls, Labelle’s(2008) itinerant, this “figure out of place, constituted by being far from home, […]  [a figure] searching for resources and for the means to settle; […] to gain knowledge through experiences of the local” (Labelle, 2018) which aligns with Musser’s (2018) concept of liquidity in which the flesh is mobile and able to hold multiple significations of itself. 

Short pointers for the ADHD self:  

-    An ADHD body in vocal improvisation
-    both inside and outside at the same time
-    needs extra tethers to itself because it can get lost, dissipated – internal body vibrations can provide this
-    elastic, it moves with the sound as the sound reaches, travels : it is not only sound that moves but the entire self
-    the grain of the voice is associated with the “cavernous depths of the body (muscles, mucous membranes, cartilages)” – when the voice carries the grain out into the open air, it carries this entire physicality with it 
-    perceptually, through intense ADHD hyperfocus the whole self moves, the whole self travels and becomes-with what it encounters in relation 

--- 

ADHD self is a tentative concept I’m concocting whose goal is to bring about the possibility that sound is not other than self, but sound, particularly through voice, can be felt as the self, a self that moves and forms relations as sensation calls. 
Vocal sound, then, does not get transduced by the body in the open air but becomes the body in the open air. This idea is built on Barthe’s concept of the grain of the voice, that points to a vocal materiality that comes from the “cavernous depths of the body (muscles, mucous membranes, cartilages)” (Magnat, 2020) which is is “neither personal nor original but is individual [...] it is linked to the materiality of the body speaking its mother tongue” (ibid). 
In vocal improvisation the ADHD self gives into external affective pulls, becoming-with them in the way that Manning (2013) defines affective attunement:
“Affective attunement is another mode of immanent relation where the relation radically precedes the purported unity of the self. Attunement is a merging-with of vitality affects across experiences toward emergent events. Not a feeling-of but a feeling-with.” 

Since this vocal sound is never just itself but, as Adriana Cavarero emphasisez “unlike the gaze, the voice is always, irremediably relational,” (Cavarero, 2005), the self that moves through voice is also irremediably relational.

The pressing danger I’ve encountered through practice particularly in early improvisations with others, is that the act of feeling-with can become a feeling-through that pays dearly by sacrificing itself in order to blend and sensorially become the relation. It is not a selfless ego-less community togetherness kumbaya as some free improvisation practices revere, but an obsessive hunt to please or satisfy the desires of another while wasting valuable energy in figuring out what those might be.  
I pause and draw attention to these neurodivergent challenges that call for different techniques to support a sonic practice that respect the sensory differences of an ADHD body. 
The ADHD self then becomes a metaphysical formulation of selfhood in which the self is mobile, flexible, and can merge with what is outside itself AND always retains a tether to what it is, wants, desires (admitting that is in constant flux). 

I further argue that voice, the visceral vibration within the fleshy self is an essential tool that acts as both a tether of the self to a sense of ‘home’ and an extender of selfhood at a distance that affords sensual blending with affective events in the making. 
I’m proposing this extension, reach and elasticity of the vocal ADHD self as a practical artistic tool that respects and understands the neurodivergent challenge. As Jean-Luc Nancy states:

 
“To sound is to vibrate in itself or by itself: it is not only, for the sonorous body, to emit a sound, but it is also to stretch out, to carry itself and be resolved into vibrations that both return it to itself and place it outside itself.” (Nancy, 2002) 

Specifically, and somatically, voice is a tool through which the power of this superposition can be felt: both the stretch out of oneself and the tethering to self through breath and vibration. Sounding is thus an act of awareness, listening and affective attunement, but it is also, and I argue essentially for ADHD experience, a stimulating physical act. Vocal activity sends oxygen and fluids moving through a body that can do with the extra carnal help of physical processes in order to not dissipate or blend with the other. The focus here has similar motivations to Barthe’s grain, a ‘non-discursive significance which must be experientially apprehended through sensory perception.” (Magnat, 2020)

In my practice I use and rely on voice to be a tether to myself and I also instrumentalize other objects (Ecstasies of things), materials, tactile or olfactive processes (Balancing Art Residency, Tea Break) and spaces (Ecstasies of Rooms) to help with this process of sensory tethering, or, as I define further down, self-sensing.  
I am only just making a dent in this section at conceptualising the ADHD self, but the relation between an ADHD experience and affordances of what Magnat (2020) calls the ‘performative power of vocality’ are a fruitful arena that would benefit for further exploration beyond this thesis.  

The erratic, within this context, becomes how this extended ADHD self travels and perhaps even where one is (in an unspecific way). Is the movement of the self, as determined by sensation, linear? Is it fractured? Has it been hijacked by tangents and digressions? Is it following fast shifts or oscillations between extremes? Has it become enthralled in one particular sensation, reinforcing it through deeper stimulation? All of these accounts are directly drawn from my experience with vocal improvisation as I have leaned deeper into these ADHD traits. The accounts have been closely gathered through repetition and observation on what is already there as an approach that requires least effort for the greatest rewards. It has been an Occam's razor approach to ADHD musicking which led to a deeper understanding of sonic form and structure.

If the erratic is how one travels or where one is, then the erotic is how intensely one feels in that extended selfhood - the fullness of that experience that leads the self to expand, leak and travel. 

" For the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing. Once we know the extent to which we are capable of feeling that sense of satisfaction and completion, we can then observe which of our various life endeavours bring us closest to that fullness."  (Lorde, 1978)  

This ability to feel fully, to feel until you are besides yourself, bulging outwards, exploding, expanding, reaching further, has been a measure of capacity and resilience for my sonic practice. Investing in this capacity to feel as the erratic led the way brought forward sensory and practical conditions for this feeling to happen. 

I this context, I use the term self-sensing to define a trajectory of attention that comes from the (extended) self back towards the (extended) self, identifying one's intrinsic needs, desires, pleasures as a matter of priority over whatever external powers might determine one's movement. 

What pulls the self into movement? 

In light of the earlier discussion about the erratic and the erotic, what pulls the self into movement is, then, a predisposition of ADHD selfhood to live in-between self and other, being pulled by external distractions, residing more easily in the incoherent sphere of feeling. 

One of the destinations for this extended self can be seen through a feminine lens of overused-empathy that pulls one further into another, to the detriment of one's self sensing. As Andrea Long Chu (Chu, 2019 cited by Reardon-Smith, 2021) states, the word female becomes “any psychic operation in which the self is sacrificed to make room for the desires of another”. This is a prioritisation of the other, the motherly care towards another, the role of the giver, the satisfier, the holder of another. Having grown up in a misogynistic patriarchal culture and family in post-communist Romania, this has deep resonances. 

Combining the feminine angle with neurodivergence and diasporic confrontations leads to my sense of living in a body defined by intersectional identarian imprecision. The pull I feel towards another can indeed be due to an undeniable female disposition, but it might also be for neurodivergent reasons - a predisposition to be affected by the external actions of the other. In this double whammy, the sense of stuckness or prioritisation of the other becomes particularly powerful, leading even to a sense of threat or danger that can come from the encounter with the other. The idea that I will be stolen away from myself without volition. That I will forget about my own desires, being taken over by the other's desire. 

In the very early stages of the research, when I was reconnecting to my voice after a break of about ten years of not using it performatively, the physicality of the other did not even need to be present to affect my body and the process of sounding. The other was an imaginary interlocutor, an imagined and projected tension, a fear of their judgement, a fear that what I am doing might not be satisfying their desire, an a priori defeatism, a forever failing endeavour. 

This hyper-sensitivity to the sense of threat the other brings with them is something that I've been directly in contact with throughout the development of the practice. The limitations this brough to sharing any kind of expression that was motivated by self-sensing were evident: if I revel in my own pleasures, exposing them for others to judge, they might be judged negatively, even violently, becoming over-powered into silence and submission. So the questions became: how do I redirect the movement of the self from the magnetic pull of the other back towards the self or how do I practise self-sensing? In what ways can I encounter the other so that their power and risk of destruction they bring is minimised? And, over time, how can I encounter the other directly, sensing them while staying connected to my own self-sensing? 

Despite the functional distinction I make here between inside-outside and self-other, I will reiterate that the reality of experience is muddier and murkier, being more closely described by an incoherent sphere of feeling where the boundaries between these distinctions are blurred. The sense of travel, extension or stuckness of selfhood in another is a specific felt intensity that through repetition in practice showed itself as important and worth focusing on. It is, if we want, a subcategory of the types of erratic movement that are available to the ADHD self.

Brief nod to sonic research context 

In sonic arts avenues of embodied sonic knowing have been opened up as theoretical possibilities or analyses of other practitioners' works by LaBelle (2018), Schulze (2017), Voegelin (2023, 2024) and Robinson (2020). While more and more work is being done to bring to the foreground perspectives on sonic embodiment from within through practice-based research, this type of research still seems to be searching for a clearer place in the mainstream or hardcore academic space, being more often found infiltrating the cracks through artistic research or practice.  

For now I will mention the work already done on feminist improvisation that Hannah Reardon-Smith has assembled (Reardon-Smith, 2021, Reardon-Smith, Denson and Tomlinson, 2020) or on transdisciplinary improvisation from McPherson (2023). In neurodiverse composition more specifically, fellow researchers Bernett (2023) and Redelinghuys (2022) offer perspectives that have solid theoretical foundations and are experimental in format, while Watson (2024) compliments the richness of neurodivergent art making from a dance angle.  

Music as vibration

Nina Sun Eidsheim (2015) considers the process of musicking as an 'intermaterial vibrational practice'. I'm using Eidsheim's perspective to jump cut this discussion into the realms of the sonic as embodiment that is relationally felt and enacted. 

What Eidsheim refers to when she calls forward vibration is the actual physical energy or wave that emerges from sound. This vibration, she argues, can be transmitted as inter-material flow, in other words it moves through physical matter be it water, bone, skin, air, etc. Later in her analysis she includes in her definition of ‘music as vibration’ not just the vibration itself but also the ‘material that vibrates’ (Eidsheim, 2015, p.161). Essentially Eidsheim removes the distinctions between subject, object and the space in-between the two. With these tools she draws an ontology of music as 'intermaterial vibrational practice', a deeply relational and physical practice which sees music as ‘an unfolding phenomenon that arises through complex material interactions’ (ibid, p.2).

Eidsheim’s musicological framework combines together not particularly new ideas around interrelational experience (new materialism, post-humanism and process philosophy have long resided there) but successfully connects those ideas to the field of music and sound. Where her theory stops short is in accounting for the ambiguous, the overflow of experience beyond physical sensation, the excess of the felt that cannot be grasped or named.

This more-than of experience, is, as I have uncovered first hand, not just a conceptual way to reorganise or talk about experience, but a practically useful way of gaining more sensory precision that leans into the ADHD body's innate ways of being. 

 To move forwards with this, I will delve into a brief and selective encounter with the concepts of affect and atmosphere that launches the higher density theoretical discussion.

Limitations of other theoretical approaches

The models I had early on to work through embodied expressive intensities were models that bracketed experience in order to try to isolate some parts of it so that 'less' can be dealt with at once. Methods of phenomenological reduction when isolating sound objects were familiar to me and have been fruitful in the past when working in a more aesthetic-led sonic process of creation (see Minu, 2017). These models, while effective to an extent, presuppose an ability to isolate different elements of experience, an ability to retain singular focus as this separation takes place. This leaves out parts of the corporeal experience that sometimes is so strong that background processes (such as perception of light quality in a room, or audience) become forward processes that take over attempts to express and make sound. For this reason I went searching for alternative models that come closer to what my body feels while sounding and account for a more incoherent or unstable form of experience. 

For me, incoherence did not bring fear but liberation. To consider the power to affect that everything has without obsessing over what might be causing it allowed me to redirect resources from cause identification to feeling whatever is there, being intimately close to it and expressing it.