Week 1: Looking into Music and the Brain

Hello and welcome back to my blog! This week marked the official start to my senior project. Although my AP Psychology mock exam took up the majority of my Monday, I dove straight into my project by beginning on my readings and building my general plan for the next few months. I began drafting my standard questions which I will use for my music therapist interviews, for which I have also begun planning interviewees. Next week we will send out emails requesting these interviews. 

On Wednesday, I was able to go into the Life Story Club office and start working. As I briefly mentioned last time, the Life Story Club works to combat the loneliness epidemic by providing a community for older adults. This typically includes weekly Zoom meetings with one Life Story Club volunteer/member facilitating the call and around 6 club members (groups determined by region and/or background) sharing their life stories centered around a relevant and interesting prompt. 

On Wednesday, however, I was able to sit in on two club meetings, where I greatly enjoyed listening to members’ stories of luck and female inspirations (the two prompts for those meetings) and getting to add in my own stories as well. In my first session, I got the chance to mention my project and my interest in music, and every participant lit up when they got the chance to speak about their love for music. Their similar enthusiasm made me even more excited to begin my full music-based meetings. 

In discussing my project, my on-site advisor Ezra Gates and I began by outlining my duties as an intern, for which I will not only help with my weekly club meetings, but also help alleviate some friction in the organization’s tedious tasks (ex: helping patch participants into the Zoom meeting). Starting next week, I will co-facilitate club meetings on Mondays (with the music-based LGBTQ+ club group) and Fridays (where I will begin a “limited run” of music-based sessions with club members). In both of these groups, our prompts will be music related, and my goal is to understand first-hand how music is incorporated into, and has impacted, these older adults’ lives, a key point in my project. Next week, I will work with a team of Life Story Club meeting facilitators to plan prompt ideas and brainstorm how to incorporate music into my Friday club meetings. 

For my readings, I officially started Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness by Renée Fleming, where the forward—much like my progress in the senior project so far—focused primarily on the background to music therapy and the author’s observations of music having an influence in the brain. I look forward to reading more from Fleming, a renowned opera singer who contributed greatly to Sound Health—a collaboration between the (then) Kennedy Center and the National Institutes of Health to bring together neuroscientists and musicians—to gain a more general understanding of music therapy from a variety of perspectives, a diversity which I also hope to bring into my final project. 

Additionally, I read “Alone in the Dark” by Carolyn Sayre, where I began looking at music therapy in a clinical setting. In this article, Sayre looks at the impact of music therapy on dementia care, using specific examples primarily from a nursing home resident: Beatrice. This piece reflects my goals for my own project, and so I will continue to take inspiration from Sayre as I create a well-rounded insight into music therapy.

Next week, I will begin preparing for my Friday music sessions (creating prompts and getting acclimated with the group) while also hopefully starting interviews/set times for interviews. I am very excited to continue laying the foundations of my project and to dive deeper into dementia and music therapy, as this week was focused on the general application of music in the brain.

For more, please read my senior project proposal.