The erotic lingers in pleasure, is moved by desire, it feeds on sensuality, it liberates taboo sensation and revels of the fullness of experience that traverses the extended body, integrating it in expression. The erotic is an intimacy of the viscera, a surprise to oneself, an uncontrolled intensity, a spillage out of what’s too full.
Introduction
What I am doing in this thesis is a deep embodied identitarian, sensorial and sensual enquiry into sonic strategies for a neurodivergent making. The fields I situate this research in first and foremost are artistic practice research and experimental music composition. This means that I am using the process of creation, of developing, refining and reflecting on an artistic practice to share knowledge inherent in the doing.
To date, epistemic contribution to the field of music composition from (self-identified) neurodivergent bodies have been very few (see Bernett, 2023 and redelinghuys, 2022) but these resonate with the calls for attention to what Schulze (2018) calls corporeal epistemologies which “exercise and expand polysensory perception beyond the limits of culturally habitualized sensory practices.” (p. 140, Schulze, 2018)
I use neurodivergence as a conceptual model that supports sensory difference to be articulated in ways that blend psychophysical, somatic, affective and emotional experiences together. Within this framing I insert the concepts of the erratic and erotic to draw deeper connections to my own sensoriality and artistic choices. This thesis centres particularly on ADHD but does so with less of a focus on pathology and more as an enquiry into sensorial and attentional affordances that can be creatively put to use.
In the newly established field of Critical ADHD studies leaning into affordances of the neurodivergent body is referred to as a strength-based approach to ADHD in which ADHD’ers are advocating for the ‘epistemic legitimacy of experience-based expertise in contrast to (or at least in addition to) scientific expertise" (Brown, Bertilsdotter Rosqvist and Jackson-Perry, 2024) and consider "ADHDers’ embodied experiences of ADHD as a site of invention rather than intervention." (ibid)
My belief in investigating neurodivergent affordances emerged over the course of this research. In the section on precarity below I detail how this became an important framing as well as the challenges that come from working through an ADHD body.
Because this thesis is in itself a exposition of an artistic process in which I mainly draw on my embodied struggles and neurodivergent affordances in different ways, what gets revealed is not just a set of examples on how composition can be done differently but an infected thesis, dripping with bits of me, dripping with creative strategies that cozy up next to resistances instead of trying to get rid of them, strategies that work with tension instead of feeling ashamed of it, strategies that lean into processes of drifting or being distracted or absent. I recognize that the strategies I developed are creative and survival choices I made that were aimed towards less masking, more acceptance of parts of me I historically found difficult to be with. I have made the choice of confronting these parts, going towards them rather than looking away or looking at the looking away (observing the doing of the retreat, the disengagement, the disappearance).
I've kept these bits of me quite central to emphasize the importance of being specific when working creatively with bodies. To show a value of marginality - this is a perspective amongst many, this is MY body, not A body or THE body - value that ultimately contributes to a collective knowing of composition that does not favour a particular approach or gets defined in opposition to a status quo. Doing that, while tempting, would've only reinforced power or a sense of canon or authority when talking about composition or, for that matter, neurodivergent experience.
I pain here a sensory picture of a creative process that works with sensory struggles, aiming to build them into momentary coherence or to be at ease with their incoherence through joy, pleasure, stimulation, desire, vibration all enabled by voice. This pleasure driven approach is what calls forth the power of the erotic as defined by Audre Lorde (1978) - the power to feel one’s own desire, one’s own pleasure, one’s own joy and welcome it to run wild, to drive, to screech, to scream.
The artistic practice is neurodivergent in a few different ways: It is generated by a body that is restless, a body that experiences the world in resonant, affective ways in which sensory modalities merge, in which the background and foreground of experience intermingle, in which what happens inside or outside oneself is not easy to differentiate, in which uncontainable intensities take over the body and affect its expression. The work is neurodivergent also in the way it reconfigures relationships between participants, audiences and contexts of making. This is not done conceptually but sensorially – when hierarchies become physically choking, they are reconfigured and flattened to bring ease to the performing body and to enable expression (Balancing Art residency, Tea Break); when a hyper-focusing or foregrounding of the sonic feels overwhelming, a blending of sensory modalities allows the sonic to manifest without trepidation (Ecstasies of Things).
The tensions that can be felt in navigating this thesis around explicit articulations and held back ambiguous suggestions is my way of injecting some epistemic doubt into the matter – this is the realm of the felt and the poetic and the artistic that dances with the more-than of experience – it’s stability is precarious, it’s ability to be pinned down and expanded on better served by the doing itself and by lingering in its affective resonances.
The way the thesis is presented invites what Singh (2017) calls a ‘vulnerable reading practice’ – which welcomes way of being alongside it, co-making it together. This co-making is also present in the compositions themselves, often audiences becoming co-creators of the event. Singh (2017) defines a 'vulnerable reading' practice through the act of listening:
“Listening, as an act that might let each other in—psychically, physically—to another’s way of inhabiting the world; to being entities that are always touching and being touched by others, even when we are not aware of this touching, even when this touching is entirely unpredictable” (Singh,2017 cited in Reardon-Smith, 2021)
This is a way of engaging with text or audio-video material by resonating alongside it. This is how I’ve existed alongside other doers myself and this is what I would like to offer to the ones experiencing my work. In this way, I am asking the reader to not be precise alongside me and to open to their own 'impurity' of thought and mind which, in this context is welcomed to contaminate the content so that the meeting happens somewhere in the middle of the knowledge soup.
This knowledge soup (or at least my contribution to it), is specifically presented as a website in which the practice, audio-visual reflections on the practice and visual artefacts of the practice are directly accessible and embedded into the fabric of the thesis. I’ve centred the doing so that the knowledge can be transmitted and experienced through the artistic matter itself as much as possible. Because most of the work is participatory, there will always be a limit to how much documentation can do. To make up for this limitation I have taken various experimental approaches to form. For example, in a softer sound, an earthquake – I offer a nonlinear audio-visual exposition in which I reflect on the performance in the immediate aftermath of it; in Embodied Improvisation Research Workshops I share audio-video snippets of one-to-one sessions with musicians that inform the group work dynamic; in the Sun Infusion collaboration I start with a performative piece of writing that articulates the sensory excess I felt in performance and end with an analysis of a sonic form emergent in the doing that I call the open loop. All of these different styles and qualities are formatted to reflect their specific affective power using fonts and colour appropriate to the context. This type of attending to the practical knowledge shared in this thesis also resonate with what Dylan Robinson calls ‘apposite methodologies’:
“Apposite methodologies are processes for conveying experience alongside subjectivity and alterity; they are forms of what is sometimes referred to as “writing with” a subject in contrast to “writing about.” They also envision possibilities for how writing might not just take the form of words inscribed on the page but also forms that share space alongside or move in relationship with another subjectivity. “Writing” in this sense might be considered either a textual or material form: song writing, sculptural writing, and film writing. [...]
Apposite forms of writing, through their form, grammar, and language, convey how the writer/listener moves alongside musical or artistic subjectivity. This movement alongside music is not exclusively aimed at conveying intimacies of music’s presence; it may equally result in a variety of apposite relationships including keeping music at a distance, oscillations between intimacy and distance, or a kind of “marking time” similar to the experience of traveling alongside other vehicles moving at varying speeds or when gridlocked in traffic.” (p.81, 82, Robinson, 2020)
In the Thinking section I bring this knowledge into a whirlpool-whammy, sometimes disorienting dance with theory, in which I try to bring some stability to that which is forever in motion in the practice. I am drawn to and invite others to be drawn towards a deeper intellectual investigation, one in which concepts can become seductive for their power to make a home for a body struggling for coherence. The seductive power of conceptual thought may fall flat with some bodies. If it does, this is a welcomed refusal that I make space for in this research. The permission to refuse the invitation to engage with theory is also why theoretical concepts are hinted at throughout the portfolio of practice without being gripped. They are mere invitations into a conceptual engagement with the work, translations into a different language, a language that hums alongside the main tune, which is the practice, sang by the same voice.
On composition
When I moved to the UK from Romania to start my undergraduate degree, I picked the course called Music Technology over Sound Engineering because the word ‘music’ was in the course title. At Birmingham Conservatoire, where I was doing my degree, I found myself in front of huge mixing desks and in rooms with jazz performers, brass bands and classical orchestras and had, for a few years, my mind blown at the possibilities of music making that were revealed to me. In my final year of university, I found a route that provided more creative satisfaction than production alone: electroacoustic composition. I found electroacoustic music and music concrete (through the likes of Pierre Schaeffer (2012) and Denis Smalley(1997)) to offer some possibilities of expression and experimentation that did not require the kind of virtuosity that people around me spent years training for. Instead I could experiment, chop, splice and record unexpected objects, get my hands dirty while trying not to literally spill water, goo, mud or other fluids all over the microphones. What weird, intellectually stimulating and sensory pleasing sonic fun!
In my master’s at Glasgow School of Art I put to work my fascination with Pierre Schaeffer’s typo-morphology theory to create a moving image notation software that would allow me to manipulate visual textures in real time to define visual-sonic trajectories that musicians could use as abstract scores. (It was during my master’s that I got diagnosed with ADHD and put on medication for the following five years.) This desire to combine sensory modalities and to work with abstract aesthetic qualities of scores continued to manifest in compositions I created after my masters. I would use my producer skills to ask questions and support musicians to find creative solutions to problems I was posing, and I would put to work my unorthodox creativity to offer them sensory props and stretch the contexts we or they were performing in.
When I started the PhD the idea of sensory props and contexts was the starting point for further research as were the strategies of collaboration or co-creation that were emerging from my dynamics with musicians. I was starting with a view of composition as being deeply collaborative, with sonic form emergent from sensory explorations and music as a performative, improvisation-derived act.
I wondered how far I could stretch ideas of sensory props. Could I work with VR, could I work underwater or in steam or sauna rooms (Arlington Baths, the Victorian Baths in the west end of Glasgow was a venue I secured for research before the pandemic came and cancelled those plans) and how would these collaborations unfold. The questions I was posing then were still very much at a distance from selfhood, but they were based in ideas of embodied knowledge (inspired by Ben Spatz’ (2015) work) and calls for ‘the bodies playing the music to be part of the music’ from composers like Jennifer Walshe (2016). What I didn’t foresee in my prior experiments was how central my own embodiment and expression were going to be in the creative enquiry. Back then my identity and neurodivergence seemed obscene intimate details that I was somewhat ashamed were leaking into the work. It was challenging for me to find value in bringing my body so close to the creative process, to let my embodied challenges and idiosyncrasies to be put to use creatively. The Covid 19 pandemic thrust me into those experiments which defined the way my research was done. What emerged from the practice were a range of approaches as well as modes of collaborating, participating and performing through directly informed by my neurodivergent experience.
In this context, the word composition followed me. It followed me as I attended Darmstadt Summer school for the second time, it followed me as I was getting commissions from international contemporary classical festivals, and it followed me into research departments I was visiting abroad to do my work. And I held on to it although everyone seemed a little confused why I did.
The reason I did was because music is my home and the body I have, with all of its challenges, is the only body I have. It is sound that has opened my body to identity and neurodivergence and it is sound that reveals and determines performance situations I co-create. Not sound as concept or as electronically manipulated mathematical function but sound as felt sensation, as vibration and as somatic tool through which I experience and interrogate relations in the world. I make with sound.
In the realm of contemporary music composition I was in touch with through the western-centric new music scenes, I found the somatic potentials of sound to be underused and sometimes misunderstood completely, endlessly theorized, abstracted and rarely felt. If I worked with contemporary musicians and invited their sound to affect or inform their physical expression or vice versa, many didn’t know how to enable physical sensation to be present. Some were deeply stimulated and inspired by the idea that they can roll around the floor and still play flute or clarinet or saxophone but needed specific support or techniques to enable them to get there – techniques that were not part of their usual training.
This gap of embodied knowledge animated a feeling of revolt and refusal in me, refusal to have the somatic potential of sound be sidelined, either by being theorized without actually being done or by being handed over to the dance or theatre worlds. It motivated me to take somatic sonic technique seriously and to train to develop skills that could support this kind of work.
The worlds of dance and theatre are doing quite well at exploring somatic expression (pioneers like Steve Paxton (Bige, 2019), Simone Forti (Albright, 2024), Deborah Hay (2020) to name but a few), particularly through voice (the immense work of Jerzi Grotowski (Magnat, 2014)). In my experience of some of this work in experimental dance workshops or theatre-based experimental performances (in Canada and in the UK) , I found sound determined embodied creativity often to fall short because it lacked the intimate relationship with sonic potential that musicians develop over many years of practice - ways of listening and feeling the complexities inherent in sonic dynamics or sonic forms that moved beyond immediate gratifying impulse. In the realms of vocal pedagogy researchers like Shannon Holmes (2020), Sophie Fetokaki (2023) or Ilona Krawczyk (2021) are drawing attention to the challenges and solutions of working in more embodied ways with the fullness of the human body and identity in performance, particularly through voice. In vocal performance and even composition, exciting work is being done by artists and researchers such as Veza Fernandez (Lehman et al., 2022) or Cara Tolmie (2019) which instrumentalize their bodies and the power of voice to generate new performance contexts.
Now at the end of this research I am comfortable in calling myself an improviser, a voice researcher and pedagogue as well as a trauma informed somatic practitioner (a lot of this gained through my Fitzmaurice Voicework training). And while what I do could be more precisely articulated as sound performance making, I hold on to the word composer in an attempt to explicitly resist the exclusion of somatic knowledge from music making and to draw attention to the needs and questions that emerge from working from the body. This is perhaps a futile or naive attempt to expand the word composition which I do here not to wrestle with terminology or semantics but to draw attention to the practical challenges that might be encountered when new ways of making are being explored. It is an attempt to bring awareness to what happens when calls for ‘the bodies doing the music to be part of the music’ (Walshe, 2016) are taken seriously and specifically, when a neurodivergent body happens to answer the question ‘Whose bodies are at stake?’ (Heile and Iddon, 2024) which starts making a dent in breaking with “the implicit universalism of prevailing discourses around the body and embodiment in music” (ibid).
In this way I compose and am a composer. A composer that works with a sound that vibrates through my neurodivergent body. A sound that morphs into touch or into movement without understanding it has changed modalities and without needing to. I compose in the ways that I hold space for the fullness of expression to manifest in my body and the body of the people I work with and the audiences that experience the work. Expression that can be muddy, murky, difficult to express coherently, difficult to hold down for later repetitions or hard to place inside or outside of a self, in the foreground or the background of experience. Because to not repeat precisely or to retain linear focus is not a lack of virtuosity, it is a gift of creativity, a form of respect given to the affective impact of the moment, context and mood. To change process and adapt to what my corporeal experience informs me is creatively possible or generative is not to fail at virtuosity but is to develop a different virtuosity, a somatic sensual virtuosity that incorporates intensity of feeling and attentional possibilities based on interest or impulse into the creative act. A somatic sonic virtuosity that lives in sensual relational possibilities of manifestation. I compose because I consider space, materials, temperature, mood, power dynamics, physical positions in space, light and dynamism of bodies as important elements that can richly affect or be affected by sound and can at any point be drawn to the foreground as sonically activated materials. I compose because I enable sensory, sensual and somatic experiences of sound to lead.
I do this after many years of training in music improvisation with people like Maggie Nicols as well as through playing and exploring with improvisers in Europe and Canada. I also gained a lot of my skills by connecting with many different practices from somatics, dance and theatre, relentlessly searching for tools and techniques that are transferred body to body. The most relevant of these practices is my recently acquired teacher certification in Fitzmaurice Voicework, the work with Kate Hilder and Margaret Pikes in Roy Hart and Action Theatre and the wonderful multifaceted work of Persis-Jadé Maravala. I detail all of this in the section on Embodied Research into existing techniques and practices and put some of it to work in the Splendor Micro-Residency.
On Intensity of feeling
A lot of the creative processes I present here involve sounding in emergent ways that could be called improvisational. What this sound does (often through voice but not only) is somatic, a result of processes determined by intensities felt in the body. I emphasise here a particular part of this somato-sonic relation, the part in which sound is in a profound relation to bodily processes that have a hold on it and shape it intentionally or not. Accepting this loss of sovereignty to do with expression is something that took time to understand.
Earlier on in the research I found myself being drawn towards expressing sensation while my relationship to my own sensing body was disturbed. The extremes I lived at were - I could either sense 1) intense overwhelming sensation because it would flood me uncontrollably or 2) intense numbness, oblivion to sensation, an escapist absence. I was living in sensory confusion, in endless attempts to quiet something down, ashamed I could not control this intense expressive power but also annoyed that it existed in the first place.
Tensions manifested to such an extent that they choked me up, took over my body stopping or hijacking my expression before it materialised, leaving me mute and confused. In other cases I would scream or shout or wail in intense emotional discharges meant to empty me of feeling. The intensity of my sensations which led to these two extreme pendulations between muted silence or uncontrollable outpourings were a drastic response to a perceptual reality that laid itself out as a methodological question: if the embodied sensations I feel when attempting to make sound can affect expression to such a degree, how can I channel and work with these intensities within musical expression without 1. being destroyed by them and 2. without ignoring or bracketing them off in from the creative act.
When I could withstand these intensities enough to feel them, I started exploring what they are and what they have to give. In that process I understood that intensities can have an ambiguous cause while being clearly felt and manifested in the body. I’ve learnt that they can be both additive and subtractive, leading to sensory overload or numbness.
The range of artistic approaches I developed aimed to nurture and support an expression that taps into intensities that live at whatever end of the spectrum - microscopic voids or engorged gushes. The emergent vocal sound that I've birthed through this process can manifest in the form of almost silent utterances, mumbles, but also visceral explosions, leakages or emotive howls that carry within them sensations of the body.
The erotic and erratic became ways to encapsulate these intensities and to specifically connect them to impulse, desire, pleasure, self-soothing and other bodily processes that dictate this particular expressive act.
I came to learn that these intensities are connected to my own female excess, with emotive leakage and also with a type of embodied misogynistic self-repression build on my lived experience. I've found repression to manifest also in connection with my neurodivergent experience. After instances of social rejection directly resulting from manifestations of my impulses, I over-learnt to quiet and control myself, to desensitise from sensation as an attempt to reduce the risk to be hurt or to hurt others. These repressions led to a closing-in that severed my connections to impulses out of a desire for self-preservation.
One of the most challenging, enduring, humbling and rewarding part of my practice has been to re-learn to sense and listen to impulse, to value and support it to manifest through sonic expression.
On Incoherence
This research blends together knowledges coming from various realms of the body including proprioception and interoceptive sensation, emotions, mental/imaginary, somatic, exteroception, mood, and other felt affects. I take this blend together and unify it under the realm of feeling. Here feeling is not attributed to one sense perception or to a physical act or action but is allowed to be coming from anywhere without precise knowledge of where that might be as long as it is felt, defining an incoherent sphere of feeling. I do this in line with theories of affect and atmosphere that I unpack in §2. Thinking.
I also do this to move away from pathologising various intensities as only to do with the psychological realm, when in fact felt effects of imprecise intensities are or can be ubiquitous in a performer's body. In this way I call for an abundant space within the realms of art and music-making to be made, a space that accommodates for different experiential modes of being. This artistic practice starts carving out this space. A space that reconsiders how processes of making accommodate, support and nurture creative expression that is powerful but unbounded, erratic or unhinged.
To this end I could talk about my own performance anxiety, insecurity, tension, trauma, self-doubt, ecstatic pleasure or manic happiness and other felt intensities I've experienced, but choose instead to keep the cause imprecise and talk about sensation, vibration and felt-ness. This reframing into the neutral zone, one that does not carry the burden of pathology or diagnoses but reframes felt affects as having sensory complexity has made it easier for me to feel them without a pre-determined assessment of value. This has helped me focus on the potential of intense sensation rather than seeing it as a burden or something to overcome, even when or particularly when intensity comes uninvited.
To actualise my composition intentions I’ve developed a performativity that prioritises proficiency and precision of sensation when expressing through sound, instead of focusing on source, cause or meaning. This has helped me build an ability to be with and lean into that which is incoherent but deeply felt. To attune to and express from within the incoherent sphere of feeling, making each encounter unique to the situation and the people involved.
On Voice
Voice taught me about relation. Relation to my own body, to others, to objects. It taught me how to feel these relations with more precision. Voice enabled my attention to pause, to rest, to linger in details. Details of my own emotions, details of others and their powers, details of objects and spaces, background details brought to the foreground. Voice taught me how to feel the distance between myself and another, how to inhabit that distance and how to find routes back to myself. Voice has been my biggest teacher, lover, friend. It has choked me, scraped my throat or pulled muscles in my back signalling that something is in tension, in deeply felt contradiction. I've used these signals to determine routes of least resistance but also to lean into the scrapes and aches, playing, screaming, mumbling, uttering at the threshold of pain and pleasure.
When I stopped being concerned with what voice does when it reaches its destination, I began to learn about what it can do from within and around me. It revealed microscopic fragilities and, in the next breath it functioned as an atomic blast. When I stopped trying to control it and allowed voice to run free I found voice jumping between extremes. Voice revealed me to myself and I cried and I listened. With what I gathered I started building worlds, depictions, trajectories, invitations to feeling that others could join in.
I offer more on voice and its power to reveal the qualities of what I call the ADHD-self in the Thinking section.
Precarious body
Nina Eidsheim details the extreme vocal experiments artist Julia Snapper has undertaken in her work:
“As a classical singer who trained for most of her life in order to gain complete control of her voice, Snapper began a journey toward unsettling that foundation. She wanted to complicate her performing relationship with her instrument, her voice, by pulling the rug out from underneath herself, so to speak, implementing techniques that would undo her hard-earned control. She found that “the operatic instrument is actually incredibly tough” and difficult to disturb.“ (Eidsheim, 2015)
In comparison to Snapper’s approach described by Nina Eidsheim above, my somatic sonic explorations are not looking to disrupt something stable but are looking to build and be with the unstable, the precarious, that which can break or recoil into overprotection and safety. The edge I work at with voice is dangerous for its possibility to destroy me if I've misused it, given too much away or held too much back. (I expand on this extended range in § 3 – Doing where I paint a detailed picture of the ranges of risk within which I work.) All of these concerns resonate within the self and are inextricably linked to a sense of vitality, worth, aliveness and the expression of my own immanence. The ambiguous and imprecise is an essential tool in this context as to not make bonds that are overly explicit about ME, that is not the interesting part here - if I am healed or not, if I am broken or suffering or powerful or weak. Removing these expressions from calculations of self worth while, at the same time, having them spring in my soma, in my feeling states, in the way I neurodivergently inhabit the world and sharing them with the world, that is interesting. Composing with them and respecting their vitality, their needs, their demands and learning how those needs can affect the creative strategies I take.
Thinking of making art for healing or thinking of suffering for art is incomplete. I am interested in being with my feeling states, developing the closest, most cost-efficient pleasurable ways to share them with the world, then becoming curious of what forms these could take, what processes are needed, what contexts house them best. If my feeling states require indirect contact to emerge to the surface or if they require a non-specific sensory expression (that is inherently vibrational, hence sonic) to communicate itself, moving between touch, movement, sound and other objects - why not work with these found ways of accessing this vital material without doing any harm?
The precarity of the body I'm working with revealed itself slowly and upon backward glances at the research when I've approached the encapsulation stages of the project. Because the precarious body I've worked with has been my body, there was never any point of comparison for my experience and struggles. In other words, I didn't know my body was precarious in many of the processes of making even though I felt the dangers of my own expression since it was the only body I had to feel-through. This in itself led me to almost ignore precarity, particularly in other art forms, as I've developed my practice. This naivety of being so close to the subject matter (well, being it) that the vantage point becomes blurry, unable to focus on its own reflection. Parts of the whole become unable to be seen and reflected upon, because of the extreme proximity. This is a consequence of doing embodied research - on the plus side hyper-proximity enables sensory precision, on the downside there is a limit to how much that sensory precision can be looked at, observed and judged from afar. For a more comprehensive look at the precarious body in performance, the field of performance art is a fruitful arena to explore. Works of the late performance artist Adrian Howells (2012), some of the performance experiments of Onteorend Goed (Nibbelink, 2012) and many of Marina Abramovic’s works (Abramović, Biesenbach and Biesenbach, 2010) have questioned, harvested and devised creative approaches to work with such bodies.
What I relentlessly searched for in my practice were methods and ways of doing/working with what I sensorially unravelled through sound that could be shared body to body. This could be from my body in the act to the bodies of audiences that were experiencing the work or from my body to the body of collaborators or musicians I worked with. This diversity of roles the bodies I share the work with has is why this thesis contains a collection of examples of practice in which the focus of activity shifts. Some works only hint at sensorial possibilities or reveal them as I just encountered them (e.g. Drawing 10 red+black, Balancing Art Residency or Tea Break) while others build on this sensual knowledge to refine modes of participation (Ecstasies of Rooms, Ecstasies of Things), modes of collaboration (Sun Infusion, a softer sound, an earthquake) or modes of transferring the techniques I developed to other performers (sound mattering study: Elisabeth in the Hague, between you and me).
The erratic is liberation from coherence. It’s fragmentation and movement between parts. It’s restlessness and obsession. The erratic is free to move at the speed of one’s attention span. Free to move in a wider range of expression, small and sensual or angry and pissed off, somersaulting between extremes without need for explanation.
The erratic has been a way to encapsulate a combination of unmasked ADHD traits and to poetically connect them to my artistic practice without constantly referring back to the idea of a diagnosis. In it I blend together short-lived focus as well as hyperfocus motivated by interest-based attention, the ability to move between sensory modalities or to blend modalities freely, imprecisely, as well as a permission to oscillate within extreme ranges of vocal or physical expression. The erratic is a quality of motion of what I later define as the ADHD self which includes stimming, obsessing, disengaging, following tangents or being pulled towards the other, amongst other desire-motivated movements.
“We tend to think of the erotic as an easy, tantalizing sexual arousal. I speak of the erotic as the deepest life force, a force which moves us toward living in a fundamental way.” (Audre Lorde cited in Tate, 1985, p.132)
When searching for my own limitless expression, expression that moves through and is activated by incoherent feelings, the realm of the erotic, be it sexual or not, had to be integrated, made space for, explored. If anything, erotic expression found me, I stumbled into it, encountered it as a presence surprised at its own repression, happy to manifest. It is risky to make eroticism so central in a thesis that is eminently not about sex, but I do this with the excitement of the one that has realised that eroticism is so much more than sex.
Erotic as a form of intimacy of the viscera means here motivation of sonic action through pleasure, desire, vitality. In a way these are dirty things, things that are very close to the body, that are from the body and things that can extend and form relationships, sticky relationships with other things. In the practice these come up in the way Christine and I touch objects in Ecstasies of things, the way I bend over backwards on the piano stool in my duo with Feronia in assae, the way my whole body trembles in Sun infusion, Elisabeth's breath movement captured by the camera as she plays trumpet in sound mattering study, even the gentle yet relentless lines in Drawing 10 red+black. All of these examples contain an excess of perspiration, of bodily liquids or the equivalent. They are not proper or bounded by conventions, codes or forms, they rip their metaphorical shirt open and say 'ok, here I am, let's see what happens'. It is and isn't sex, but mostly isn’t. It's pleasure and desire lived in joy, in play, it is the jouissance of the frolic.
Duty of care
During this research I have had to learn to care for myself – to not cause myself harm, to not risk more than I can and to forgive myself when I overshoot. It took time to learn how to be with my mistakes – moments I’ve over-shared, over-protected or otherwise done it wrong without wanting to wash it away from the narrative or hide away from it - a lifelong learning. I also had to learn how to care for my collaborators and understand what care meant for audience dynamics and the performances I was making. A full analysis of what care means in neurodivergent performance asks for another doctoral undertaking in itself which is beyond the scope of this thesis. Instead I point here to an incipient set of observations about care which set the scene for further explorations. I expand on some of the concepts here in container two.
For companionship in further work on the topic, I draw attention to the resources gathered by the Promiscuous Care Study group in their Promiscuous Infrastructures, Practicing Care reader (Turner et al., 2024), María Puig de la Bellacasa's (2017) Matters of Care and the kinds of somatic approaches to self-care and resilience that practitioners like Staci Haines (2019) teach.
Self care
At the beginning of the research, when I restarted my vocal practice after ten years on pause, I encountered many embodied struggles, resistances and tensions. My first response was to avoid these, to judge or to attempt to fix them. I didn't like what I was feeling, I didn't like that I was struggling. I also didn't know how to be with these difficulties, hold them or listen to what they were trying to tell me.
Over time, by coming back to the site of these sensations through vocal utterances and vocal play I began opening up towards the site of the struggle. Voice taught me how to befriend the struggle, be with it and eventually accept it for what it is, increasing my ability to be with discomfort. This constant revisitation of locked off parts of myself while learning that by simply being within that space I was not being hurt, was a form of repeated exposure that helped me build resilience to feel and eventually express a larger palette of sensations.
The embodied training I undertook throughout the research as well as therapy sessions and many support calls with friends and mentors offered extra help to build some of the resilience I needed to develop the practice I was interested in. A practice that is tender and sensitive to difference and struggle and isn't afraid to express and build with it.
Collaborators
Given the deeply relational and collaborative nature of this practice, my own resilience was essential in order to not transfer or contaminate the relational soup with struggles that asked for unreasonable amounts of support from others. But what was reasonable anyway? The more formal contemporary classical creative spaces I found myself in did not understand what kind of struggles a neurodivergent body can go through, let alone what support it should have or was reasonable to have for bodies like mine. I often found myself in the position that needed to educate others while I was struggling, a sometimes overwhelming ask. The other spaces I was working in - more personal collaborations or research-led academic environments - were spaces that allowed for models of working together over longer periods of time. This supported relationships to grow, sometimes get broken and repaired or be mutually ended, but things had time to breathe - this was essential.
Relational trust and embodied strategies that could lead to stronger collaborative bonds over a shorter period of time became important pursuits in collaborative dynamics (Splendor, Embodied Improvisation Research workshop) . It was also essential that the artists I worked with had their own set of tools to support what could come up for them when working collaboratively within the realms of somatic sonic explorations or were willing to build resilience together. Given the experimental and emergent nature of the work, what was provoked in each body couldn't always be known apriori. This kind of vulnerable sharing is better understood through Saketopoulou’s (2023) idea of limit-consent that I detail in Container two. I also expand there on the concept of holding space and what that means within the context of an embodied relational practice.
Audiences
I have often worked with the knowledge/assumption of what is culturally normalized as a mode of engagement in a certain context, be it in an art gallery, improvised music concert or classical concert venue, then complementing and diversifying those modes, drawing attention to what is taken for granted and poking at them. The way I preferred to draw attention to these elements is indirectly, allowing the material to speak for itself and risking that it might not resonate - an opaque (but not obscure!) offering that welcomed bodies that were ready to receive, reaching towards them without educating them.
My care towards audiences was motivated by my own struggles of being an audience: struggles to be physically still or to hold a single line of focus for a long time or to attend to foreground elements of the performance instead of incidental background ones. In the performances I created I offer possibilities for embodied ways of attending to an event that were closer to my desires if I was in the audience. This difference was the inspiration for the type of participation that was offered without requiring the audiences to have the same needs or desires as me - it was offered as a difference to be noticed.
The participatory performances that asked for bigger risks from audiences because they were more intimate were iterated and tested many times to understand how to support a range of potential responses (never exhaustive in participatory work). Basic instructions or descriptions were then offered to audiences such as 'in this one-to-one performance you will blend a tea together' (Tea Break) or 'enter and sit on one of the blue chairs in silence' (Ecstasies of Things) that then enabled the performance to do its work.
In Container two I detail the specifics of resonating body to body with participants when performances become more intimate by using Saketopoulou’s (2023) concept of limit-consent. Limit-consent defines asymmetric mutuality of risk within power dynamics that are in line with Brene Brown’s (n.d.) idea of power-with instead of power-over. With participatory work, these dynamics were important to be cared for in terms of the power dynamics they raise as even though technically audiences can always leave, to exercise such a right alone in a room with a performer is not an easy feat.
On ADHD
In a slight contradiction to the statement on incoherence, I choose to retain one medical concept or diagnosis to support the discussion of this work and that is the neurodivergent/ADHD lens. I have tried to write this thesis without mentioning it in an attempt to fully dislocate causation, but those attempts led to a more convoluted and obscure discussion that did not aid the work. I include discussion of ADHD from a place of 'all models are wrong, but some are useful' - not holding too tightly its boundaries but knowing that to ignore this difference would do a disservice to the part of me that is essential to the form and function of a lot of this practice.
Including ADHD into the discussion of this work also offers a needed angle on neurodivergent research which tends to be 'heavily weighted towards autism' (Jackson-Perry and Bertilsdotter, 2024). As it stands, this research contributes to the conversation on neurodiversity and music, sitting alongside Bernett (2022) and Rhedelinghuys (2021) and is attuned to a body of work currently being done that promotes minoritarian strategies (Robinson, 2021, Kanngieser, 2023, Tan, 2024, Magnat, 2020, Bertilsdotter, Chown and Stenning, 2020, Watson, 2024) in music and beyond.
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It is hard for me to talk about ADHD. Over the course of my life, many people have minimised, misunderstood and dismissed my ADHD-ness. It’s a condition that I tried to correct and was angry at and ashamed of for a long time.
The tricky thing about ADHD is that it activates to an extreme traits that exist in most people. To understand difference in degree not in kind is slippery. It can lead one to the false assumption that they can know how life is experienced for someone who cannot focus because everyone loses focus sometimes. Without constructing a pathological unpacking here (I’ll sneak in that not focusing is an effect, not cause of ADHD, as is hyper focusing) I want to make clear this distinction of degree. To live in constant unstable and unreliable attentional dislocation is unknowable to the one that only occasionally experiences it. It is the chronic aspect of the disorder that brings with it radical difference, not the occasional experience. This doesn't mean that the knowledge exposed here could not be of use to folk without ADHD. I do not hold this knowledge hostage - I merely caution and support a self-reflexive awareness when engaging with forms of minority knowing.
While empathy, extrapolation and other tools one might have to attempt to know this kind of diversity can come from a place of kindness, what is of larger value is accepting a difference that you cannot ever know, an opaque difference, that you can learn to trust can be itself. Coming into contact with Edouard Glissant’s (1997) concept of opacity offered a deep liberation in the development of the practice. As Amber Jamilla Musser states, “To think opacity, then, means always and insistently thinking with the possibility, however momentary, of illegibility rather than a stabilized notion of resistance.” (p.11, Musser, 2018)
Firstly, engaging with this thinking gave me permissions to be in relation with opaque parts of myself. It liberated those parts to manifest without needing to be analysed, known, dissected while still manifesting themselves freely by being sensed and sometimes expressed. Secondly, it allowed me to stand by an opaque position in relation to another. It offered the idea of unknowability as a valid way to form relation, to not need to turn myself inside out in order to be seen or valued by another but to hold steadfast in my difference and be present with the unknowable difference in the other. This in itself was a new practice for me - leaning into difference rather than trying (and failing) to eradicate it in order to (attempt to) belong. The challenge here is that within this expression of difference there is a pain of being othered and having difference be ignored. As Storm paraphrasing Jacque Ranciere states “those who speak substantial difference into the reigning distribution of the logical and sensible are literally not heard: they register as babble” (Storm, 2021). To live and be in invisible difference is hard enough. To not represent it and advertise it when you have a choice to pass as normal feels like an act of self-preservation.
Understanding how to be present with the unknowable difference in another without being drawn into their desires is something I practice and fail at over and over again in everyday life. In this thesis I isolate and expand on this experience within the context of vocal improvisation and sonic sensing. In the section that introduces the practice I expose the over-used power of hyper-vigilance in relation to another in the way that I organise and present the works. The section on thinking specifically touches on the instincts of the self to travel or be stuck inside another, as well as the power of voice to support a tethering to oneself while in sonic relation.
My ADHD body on Oliveros. An embodied reflection
Through happenstance, while researching the new book on voice by Zeynep Bulut (2025), I stumbled upon a Pauline Oliveros score, offered verbally, online, at an event at Nottingham Contemporary (2023). In an act of tangential rabbit-hole-ing, I allowed myself to be gripped by the offering, knowing that I still had things to say in this thesis about how I relate to Oliveros’ work. What emerged was a reflection on the score offering that speaks directly from my body’s experience of it. Instead of writing long analytical discussions on the concepts around Oliveros’ practice, I include this text here to allow the body to speak for itself.
This text is written as an embodied reflection in the immediate aftermath of remotely participating in Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditation no 19, offered in video form by Susanna Davies Crook. I encourage a body-to-body engagement with this writing by first participating in the 6-minute Oliveros score. The recording can be accessed here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PDtUs8RLy8k min 7:41 to 13:43. If participation is not possible, a partial transcription of the score is available by clicking here.
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I try to do it, I go for it.
Immediately the instruction on what to do with my body is confusing:
my feet need to be flat on the floor, but I am also invited to arrange myself in a comfortable position and 'however feels right' that is 'grounded in some way'.
I'm confused by what I should be looking for in my assessment of 'feeling right'. I don't know what's coming and I'm not sure what I should do.
I'm also confused by what 'grounded in some way' means.
Am I supposed to feel the physical relationship to the ground in my feet? Do I miss out on this if my feet are not on the floor so should I look to be sitting on the ground to feel the ground in my sitz bones? Or is grounding more of a metaphorical idea and if so, what would indicate that I am grounded or not? Surely these racing thoughts are not indicative of being grounded.
As a result, I am sitting in a chair with my feet on the ground in an uncomfortable position with these questions racing through my head, thinking:
'shit, I'm already failing at this and we haven't even started'.
As a result I feel agitated and a bit lost.
I am then invited to 'take three deep breaths all together'.
This is at least clear - I am not searching for my own desire to inhale and exhale but I am following someone else. (Although all together sounds more collaborative than it is, in fact we are to imitate what the person in front of us does.)
Ok, ears on her.
I inhale in sync with the leader
and,
so far so good,
but on the exhale I am surprised by the short duration of this exhale.
I brush it aside. I do it two more times.
By the end I feel like my breath is more tense and accelerated than it was at the beginning. Like I've synchronized with someone that is nervous and is on a stage and who needs a lot of quick air right now that leads to their own release but not to my own.
I do not like breathing in someone else's bio-rhythm (unless that is the whole point of a piece in which case, my composition for accordion duo ‘Breathe’ (2018) does exactly that) - but I do it despite of my resistance trying to keep an open mindbody.
Nope, in this case I really don't like it.
It seems like its point is to bring forth some body awareness, but instead it makes me feel handled, invaded, controlled and like I failed at yet another simple task.
To share breathing rhythm is a privilege. It happens in song, in community or quietly as the nervous system attunes to other people that we share the space with. Sure, an intentional long breath is undoubtedly efficient in erecting a change of state but if the intention of said long breath is to bring release, then, in my book, the awareness and physical need of the person doing it are quintessential to its success. To keep me away from sensing my own breath seems anathema to the task at hand here. To manage someone else's naked breath is already asking for a level of trust that has not been won in this situation here. I'm disappointed at the missed nuances of this ask...
I follow the rest of the exercise with all of this thinking and feeling bubbling in my body.
The eyelids-closing-awareness instruction feels like a cool party trick that reminds me of hypnosis therapy.
I'm pleased.
I'm then told to close my eyes and slowly turn them from left
.
.
.
.
to right.
The length of the pause between the words left and right snaps me out of it.
My agitation accelerates.
Why leave me guessing for that long?
I start thinking of Marina Abramovic's exercises with eyes, although I can’t remember the specifics, something with blinking and shaking the head perhaps, wondering if this is similar. At the same time I think of an exercise my teacher Persis-Jade Maravala (Zu-UK) has taught in one of her classes (standing, the eyes look extreme left while the head remains straight for a relatively long time (thirty seconds or so, which feels like forever!) then eyes go to the extreme right with the head forward for another minute, then back to centre).
I remember the effects of Jade's exercise being quite remarkable – I remember feeling a transformation, something changed in the body (I think she might've mentioned the Vagus nerve, in any case, she knows her somatics, so my buy in was total with her).
The pause in the Oliveros score instruction reminded me of that something that was done to my body before, that insertion into a state of threat that one breathes through to find release.
Was this exercise going to be similar or have I gone on a tangent?
Probably the latter.
Again.
The rest of the instructions proceed at an infuriatingly slow pace. As this happens, I am getting more and more restless.
I start spinning in my office chair and my head bobs back.
I'm less than two minutes in and I reach for the youtube settings to accelerate this motherfucking pace. In doing so I miss some instructions.
I struggle with the interface even though it's all there in front of me, the discomfort I'm feeling with the tech struggle is invading the foreground of my attention as I fail to find this stupid setting.
I finally find it, put the playback speed at x 1.5 and wait.
.
.
.
Nothing happens for a few seconds, and I second-guess my technical abilities once more.
Then a new instruction arrives, making me wail in desperation at the incredibly slow pace even with the speed turned up.
I am now vocalizing to soothe my discomfort.
My voice is doing a sort of growly vocal fry in which I am playing with subharmonics.
I am spinning in my chair and vocalizing as I'm told to listen to the sounds of my environment.
In this context, I am invading this sonic environment with my voice which is keeping me from exploding.
I get invaded by a sense of gratitude for being in my home where I can do what I need without masking and at the same time (my contradictions always travel together, propping me in the centre from both sides) a sadness for not being able to be like this in the collective environment this score is originally delivered in.
That room is quiet.
That room, although I can't see the audience in the video but can pretty much bet, is static.
I then migrate into a more profound sadness over how this composer that everyone loves is not right for me. I start wishing she was aware of this agitation and wrote scores for bodies like mine. Wishing more fault (ok maybe not fault, but I'm sad and angry) was found with the lack of scores for bodies like mine in her work and broader. Thinking that without that discourse, it's easy to think not just that I am doing it wrong but that I am being wrong.
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Now, I have a lot of caveats for this reflection.
Firstly, the day I wrote it I was in a pretty miserable state. Oliveros didn't cause it, but her work did aggravate it.
I am also experienced enough to know that
1. It's ok to not like something or for it to not be the right thing to do at a particular moment in time.
2. I can always observe when something is aggravating me and stop doing it, leaving the space, taking a break, (and sure, carry the fear that if I leave everywhere where I feel uncomfortable that just leads to my isolation and exclusion. It's something I'm working on both internally (increasing my resilience to discomfort) and externally (by pointing out what's omitted from existing contexts for bodies like mine - case in point this text here))
3. I come to this work with biases of experiencing Oliveros' work to similar results in the past so there was perhaps not a lot of patience/kindness/openness in me, despite me trying really really hard to bring that to the table.
I think there is also a question of power, of ego, and of jealousy on my end for how canonical this work has become. I've always felt a relative anger at Oliveros, as if she didn't quite do something right by me and despite of that everyone is championing her all the time (or completely ignoring her, that's probably still a thing but I'm very far in), saying how she's changed composition forever.
I,
like the stupid, competitive scarcity-led woman that I sometimes am,
can't lead with feelings of gratitude for a pioneer that has laid the groundwork (and then some) for people like me to do the work that I do.
No.
I bring rage and desire cat fights.
So be it.
I know my biases, and the world isn't lacking people that champion Oliveros' work.
Not yet at least.
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Erratic - Fast paced shift
From overstimulation to super
softness
I don’t just move towards overwhelm
I move towards overwhelm and in
the next second I’m bored
of it
I drop it
Like a rattle toy I’m no
longer interested in
Permission to shift
Permission to stay
Permission to overfixate
and loop and stim
Everything is hyper
Hyperfocus
Hypermobile
An instability you can trust
A fast paced flux
An instability we can build
together on
It’s not an endurance test
It’s a letting go
Into the unknowable
I don’t just tend towards overwhelm
I bounce
Ping pong between
extremes
Hyperspeed
Holding the space and the
attention
Keeping you curious
Keeping me open to it all
So that we can shift and morph
with it
Dissect, drop or disregard