Week 8: Music on Quality of Life

Welcome back to my blog! Despite this week being busy with AP exams, I still managed to take a ton of exciting steps forward in my research!

To start, last Friday I hosted my second to last music group with the Life Story Club. The topic was “On Repeat,” where we shared the songs/pieces of art that have stuck in our minds and kept us going through difficult times in our lives. As always, these selections became very diverse, ranging from Tchaikovsky’s “Serenade for Strings,” to “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from “Carousel,” to a beautiful ballet piece by Kimin Kim. Everybody had a smile on their faces as they shared some of their all-time favorite songs, and they all enjoyed hearing each other’s stories of when these pieces came into their lives. I cannot believe that this limited music group is coming to a close! I will miss this Friday group.

I am lucky, though, that I do not have to say goodbye just yet! Starting in two weeks, I will be interviewing select members of my Friday group in order to gain their insight into how digestible and effective my guide/final product is. Next week I will be working hard on finishing a first draft of this guide so that I can share it with these older adults and gain opinions from the target demographic on how well my guide matches my goals for it. Stay tuned for updates on that!

Speaking of interviews, I have also scheduled two more discussions with music therapists for next week, so keep an eye out for next week’s post where I will share some amazing professional insight from two licensed music therapists in the tri-state area.

As always, I continued my readings this week. I read papers on musical interventions on Autism Spectrum Disorder, insomnia, depression, and dementia in order to broaden the scope of my presentation while focusing on the effects of music on quality of life. One interesting paper I read was “A Randomized Controlled Trial Exploring the Effect of Music on Quality of Life and Depression in Older People with Dementia,” an extensive deep-dive into music’s effect on Dementia Quality of Life (DQoL) and on Geriatric Depression Scale scores compared to a control group that participated in daily reading sessions instead. Contrary to some of my other readings, researchers did not find a significant conclusion on how much more effective than reading music is on DQoL. However, researchers concluded that, considering a lack of adverse effects in the experimental group, music interventions did improve sense of belonging, self-esteem, and depressive symptoms in some dementia patients. While these effects may not have been significantly greater in the music vs the reading group, music still made a lasting impact in the brain.

I am looking forward to more interviews, more readings, and more stories to share next week. See you then!