Week 2: Starting my groups!

Welcome back to my blog! This week was an exciting one, where I got to do a lot of work at my placement, the Life Story Club. I started out the week by joining my first Monday music-based group, from which I will collect some details about the impact of music in participants’ lives. This Monday group focused on music in LGBTQ+ lives, where Life Story Club members shared songs that represented them. One participant chose Odyssey’s “Native New Yorker,” one of my personal favorites! This was a super fun session where I got to simply spend an hour discussing my love for music with older adults of the Life Story Club.

Additionally, I began planning my Friday group, for which, as I mentioned in my last blog, I will be curating to focus on music and the brain. Over six weeks (starting 4/10), I will be hosting weekly sessions for Life Story Club members to share stories about music in their lives, where each session will include a music-inspired prompt (created by me!) to get the conversation started. In these sessions, everyone (including myself) will share a song/story related to the prompt, and at the end of the hour I will share a neuroscience-based “Music Fact of the Day” based on my research that I have done earlier in that week! In order to supplement participants’ spoken words, I crafted a short survey for participants to complete before their first music-based session and after their last. Today I will collect the first responses to agree/disagree questions including, “music has been a resource I have turned to over the years,” and “I would be open to using music therapy in my everyday life.” This survey will help me gauge not only how older adults are already using music but also their understanding of music’s benefits and how willing they are to actually utilize them. These findings will be crucial to how I structure my final guide, as they will demonstrate the generalized need for music therapy and the reality of how it can be incorporated into more lives. Let’s see how it goes!

On Monday, I also read “Music as Therapy,” where I got a quick overview of the benefits of music in a variety of treatments, including infant development, pain relief, hospice care, and more. This paper is a great launching pad for my research, where I will continue diving into the specific uses of music therapy, especially in Alzheimer’s care, as I read about in “Music Intervention Approaches for Alzheimer’s Disease: A Review of the Literature.” This paper synthesizes information from six selected studies on the use of active music therapy, music listening, and general music-based interventions and reviews how different forms of music listening/therapy can benefit or affect cognition and/or behavior in individuals with Alzheimer’s disease. As I am just beginning my project, it is important for me to begin with literature reviews and broader-focus papers as I dive into my topic. Next week I will begin reading more neuroscience-based studies and narrow down my research.

After the break, I will begin my first round of interviews and finalize my Friday group plans as I host my first session on April 10th! See you then!