What does it mean to use music as distraction? Does it take us away from immediate experience, or can it return us to the body, to memory and to a more attentive relationship with the world? This episode of Distraction Therapy features a conversation with artist and musician Miffy Ryan about neurodivergence, musical memory, inherited songs, creative practice and the physical experience of sound.
The accompanying mix moves through jazz, hip-hop, dub, garage, calypso, roots reggae and Irish folk. Rather than presenting these as isolated genres, the programme follows the way music can gather attention, activate memory and create a more vivid sense of place.
Distraction And Attention
The conversation begins by questioning the usual meaning of distraction. For someone living with ADHD, distraction may not be a temporary departure from normal attention. It can be the ordinary condition from which focus has to be recovered.
The question therefore changes. Rather than asking what we use to distract ourselves, we might ask what helps scattered attention gather. What brings the mind and body back into relation? What makes the world feel vivid rather than merely demanding?
For Miffy, music is part of that process. She describes singing and composing with her partner, Richie, and listening across a wide range of traditions: experimental jazz, Afro-fusion, soul, calypso, roots reggae, dub, drum and bass, UK garage, hip-hop, punk and Irish folk.
This is not passive consumption. Music is made, remembered, analysed, danced to and physically experienced.
The Return Of Bass
At one point, the conversation turns to a discarded speaker that Miffy found on the street and wheeled home. After years of listening through small domestic speakers, the return of a powerful bass response becomes a form of sensory restoration.
The story captures something central to the episode. Sound is not only heard. It occupies space. It produces pressure, movement and resonance. A bass frequency can reorganise a room and alter how the listener inhabits it. This helps explain the movement of the accompanying mix.
Björk’s “There’s More to Life Than This”, recorded partly in the toilets of the Milk Bar, allows doors, voices and room acoustics to become part of the performance. The recording does not isolate the song from its environment. The environment becomes part of the music.
A Tribe Called Quest and Digable Planets bring jazz into hip-hop. Horsepower Productions and MJ Cole approach rhythm through the physicality of UK garage and bass music. Joe Armon-Jones connects contemporary jazz with dub, while The Congos open out the spiritual and spatial dimensions of roots reggae.
These tracks suggest that musical attention does not always begin with explanation. Sometimes the body understands first.
Music Through The Body
Miffy describes herself as a dancer and speaks about music reaching a kind of resonant frequency. This is a useful way to think about listening. A rhythm catches the body. A voice produces a remembered sensation. A bass line alters breathing, posture or movement.
Only afterwards do interpretation and analysis begin. The conversation also distinguishes between listening for pleasure and listening analytically.
When Miffy and Richie make music together, she notices syncopation, phrasing, tone, monotony and the relationship between speech and song. Yet when listening for distraction, the intention may be different. The point is not necessarily to interpret, but to enter the experience.
This tension between analysis and immersion runs throughout the programme. Jazz may be technically complex. Garage may depend on precise rhythmic construction. Dub may be built through careful production and spatial manipulation. Yet the listener does not need to understand the process intellectually for the music to take effect.
Songs That Carry Memory
The conversation repeatedly returns to inherited music. Miffy recalls Irish songs sung by her father and the Jamaican calypso records collected by her grandfather.
These are not simply examples of musical taste. They are carriers of family history and migration. Lord Kitchener’s “London Is the Place for Me” evokes Caribbean experience within post-war Britain. The Dubliners’ “Seven Drunken Nights” belongs to another tradition of songs travelling through families, pubs, performances and recordings.
Lankum’s “The Young People” brings Irish folk music into a darker contemporary space of drone and atmosphere. The sequence asks whether musical memory is ever static. When a song returns, does it recover an earlier experience unchanged?
Or does the listener create a new relationship with it from the position they now occupy?
Music As Active Practice
Another important aspect of the conversation is the distinction between consuming culture and making it. Miffy does not describe distraction only in terms of books, films or recorded music. She and Richie sing, improvise and make their own songs.
This matters because creative practice can change the relationship between attention and distraction. Making music requires concentration, but it can also create freedom from the demands of ordinary tasks. It occupies the hands, the voice, the breath and the imagination.
The activity does not remove the person from the world. It produces another way of being present within it. The same applies to Miffy’s interest in walking, recording, collecting stories and working in mobile, exploratory settings. Attention becomes something active and situated.
Another Form Of Attention
This episode suggests that distraction is not necessarily the opposite of attention:
- It may be a movement away from one kind of attention and towards another.
- A song interrupts the immediate demand of the moment.
- A rhythm reorganises the body.
- A remembered voice returns.
- A room changes because a speaker can finally reproduce the bass properly.
- Music does not always explain these experiences.
- It gives them somewhere to happen.
Track Listing
- Björk – There’s More to Life Than This (Live at the Milk Bar Toilets)
- A Tribe Called Quest – Electric Relaxation (Live)
- Horsepower Productions – Gorgon Sound (Mixed)
- Digable Planets – Pacifics
- Conversation with Miffy Ryan
- Joe Armon-Jones – Mollison Dub
- Lankum – The Young People (Edit)
- Lord Kitchener – London Is the Place for Me
- The Dubliners – Seven Drunken Nights (2012 Remastered Version)
- MJ Cole – Sincere
- The Congos – Fisherman
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