This project explores the experience of ADHD musicians and the relationship between a musical performers’ movements and their emotions/experience of performing. Using a cross-disciplinary approach from cognitive science, disability studies and music performance, the project asks how the ancillary movements performers make relate to their ‘headspace’, in terms of both focus/flow and affect. Alongside this, it asks how having an ADHD neurotype may affect and intersect with that experience. As ADHDers have dual variability in their attention and their ‘hyper’activity, it is expected that this relationship will be particularly important to this group. It is hoped that the project will both enlighten us on music cognition and our understanding of ADHD.

In contrast to many psychological studies on ADHD, which still use a medical ‘deficit’ model of ADHD, this project uses a value-neutral neurodiversity paradigm, understanding ADHD as a divergent neurotype that may afford different strengths and weaknesses depending on context. As such, the project uses Participatory Action methods allowing participant feedback and involvement to guide the direction and design of the research. This is so as to adhere to the stance of Disability activists that disabled people should be directly involved in the creation of research about them.- ‘Nothing About Us Without Us’.