Obsessing. Hyperfocusing. Getting lost to distractions. Being a “research junkie”. These are all behaviours (or a single behaviour by many different names) that a lot of people with ADHD probably resonate with. I know I regularly do, and today is absolutely no exception.
TL;DR – ADHDers love a good research session. Today I focused mine on music
As an agile technology team we do the Stuff Quiz every day at the start of our morning stand up. For those that don’t know, Stuff is the website of one of New Zealand’s largest news & media conglomerates and they publish 4 or 5 quizzes every day. The morning quiz is a semi-religious experience for many work teams and ours is one of those. It takes the form of fifteen multi-guess questions across a range of general knowledge topics. More often than not at least one question will cause quite a discussion in the team and then invariably end up with me losing 10 minutes to further research at some point during the day.
Today, we were asked which British television show used The Liberty Bell March for it’s theme song. Spoiler alert: it was Monty Python’s Flying Circus. One of the suggested options was Doctor Who. This prompted a discussion about how the theme song was composed and included a theory that at least part of the sound was recorded and played backwards. This piqued my interest and a wild YouTube session kicked off during my later lunch break.
So it turns out this is not actually true, however the real story is nothing short of amazing. The original theme was scored by a bloke called Ron Grainer. Job done. Game over. At least that’s what the official history would have you believe. It was then handed to a visionary by the name of Delia Derbyshire at the BBC. She was a pioneer of synthesised music and frankly well ahead of her time. She created the futuristic sound that we all know so well. Here’s a clip of her creating some synthesised music based on real world sounds.
This isn’t the actual Doctor Who theme as the title of the video suggests, but shows the process she went through to create the wild space-aged sound behind one of the world’s most recognisable theme songs. And guess how much credit she got for it? Composer? Co-creator? Featured artist?
Oh no. A woman couldn’t possibly have got any credit for music at “The Beeb” in the 60s!! Grainer is still the only person to be officially listed as the composer. Derbyshire merely “realised” his vision. Evidently he was so surprised when he heard the finished track that he said something along the lines of “did I write that?”, to which Derbyshire responded “most of it”. Indeed.
So that (because YouTube, am I right?) lead me further down the rabbit hole. A closing card on the Doctor Who clip alerted me to a video about another synth pioneer Wendy Carlos. I’m actually moderately embarrassed about what made me watch the clip, but in the interests of honesty, I basically went:
“Does she have the most epic sideburns?? Whats going on there?”
Turns out what’s going on there – besides my poorly motivated curiosity – is that Wendy Carlos was born Walter Carlos. She worked directly with Robert Moog in his work creating the world’s first keyboard based synth. In 1968 she released the album Switched-On Bach which was basically synthesised arrangements of music by baroque “rockstar” Johan Sebastian Bach. By this time of her life she was officially transitioning, but all of her music to date had been attributed to “Walter Carlos”. The album was such a massive success that she was thrust into the public eye at an incredibly vulnerable time. She panicked about how she might be perceived so initially decided to don a male wig and stick on sideburns when she appeared in public.
How awful is that? How come people can’t just be accepted for who they are? I consider myself to be pretty liberal, open minded and progressive but it’s over 50 years later and even I’m still going “why does Wendy have sideburns?” Says more about me than it does her. Here’s THAT clip:
Wendy won a Grammy for that work and in doing so became the first transgender Grammy winner in history. How have I never heard of her??? I studied electronic music at university in the 90s and I have never heard of EITHER of these amazing women until now!
I mean… To be fair, Wendy Carlos didn’t do much after that. Only teamed up with STANLEY BLOODY KUBRICK to compose the score for The Shining and A Clockwork Orange before moving on to the original Tron soundtrack!
So that’s my rabbit hole today. Thanks for coming with. Did I learn stuff? Sure I did. I learned women never get the credit they deserve. Lol! Kidding. I knew that already. I did learn that I still have some unconscious biases to work on.
Maybe I should take a leaf out of the book of The Northern Boys. Retiree gangster rappers from the north of England (not even joking). Don’t be fooled by their song Party Time. They might sound like a bunch of misogynistic hooligan “youfs” who like to get on the gear and pick up b****es, but this song shows just how progressive they are underneath it all. I commend them for being so open minded, especially given they’re all in their 60s and 70s!
Okay. Now the rabbit hole is complete.
My ADHD Playlist 