music research
Now
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Now 〰️
I am developing experimental techniques for sonic expression that are grounded in diverse sensory experience and voice pedagogy.
Rowdy research. Messy, sensual, excessive, unbounded, unhinged. Balanced by ethics, safeguards and support systems that make this kind of work sustainable.
Forthcoming publications
‘ADHD atmospheric attunement - putting atmospheres to use in sonic practice’ - Chapter in Routledge Edited Collection on Transgressive Sounds and Atmosphere
‘Vocal improvisation as a process of unmasking ADHD’ - video research article in Journal of Embodied Research
‘ADHD sonic style - writing through the restless sonic sensual body’ - in Canadian Journal for Disability Studies
I am a doctor in artistic sonic practice. My doctoral research took place at University of Glasgow and Royal Conservatoire of Scotland (2019-2025) and included a year-long research fellowship at Concordia University in Montreal. I am one of the first academics in music composition daring to take ADHD embodied knowledge seriously, developing new methods of making music directly derived from ADHD'ness as a site of invention.
My PhD is a rich excavation of ADHD embodiment through vocal expression, tested and tempted by many co-creative partnerships and enriched by deep performance training. It screams with feminist excess, erotics as intimacy of the viscera through a body that sometimes struggles and oftentimes can't help but manifest its pleasures through voice.
All this work was motivated by the question: what are we missing in creative techniques and sonic forms because knowledge from sensory diverse bodies is being discarded? My interest in answering it has been concerned with practices, systems, methods and new frameworks that emerge when learning to access sensory and sensual knowledge with the use of sound. This includes leaning into innate traits otherwise culturally suppressed in musical practice as well as developing ethical safeguards to not over-extend and cause more harm, particularly when working through a precarious body.
My PhD is titled 'Erratic and Erotic Voice-led Composition' and can be found here.
My research was awarded a full scholarship from Arts and Humanities Research Council through the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities.
Composition manifesto
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Composition manifesto 〰️
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. I do this 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.
Excerpt from PhD ‘Erratic and Erotic Voice-led Composition’ (2025)
Past Projects
Curated collection of past work [site in development, more info coming soon]
Client
The Atlas Project
Year
01/01/0001
Client
The Echo Project