This project aims at developing a curriculum of passive and active music making activities training for dementia social and health care professionals and informal carers, and an original music-based nonpharmacological intervention to improve the behaviour, mood, and quality of life of older people with dementia and delay as much as possible further cognitive functions decline.
Such an educational programme addresses different needs: those of dementia care professionals, who look for more effective methods and techniques for dealing with dementia patients, and of the latter to be listened and understood, to communicate through a universal language, to maintain the residual cognitive capabilities, and to improve their quality of life.
Other targets of SOUND are informal carers, who need to keep on training and acquiring new competences for better managing their loved ones in everyday life, and the wider community, which can be more easily made aware about and educated to accept and interact with dementia patients.
The SOUND methodology is something new, which is inspired to the Circlesinging (a singing form, where a group of singers, placed in a circle, “pass around” a basic sound or tune and make improvisation, created by Bobby Mcferrin in the USA) and Circleactivities - a set of creative and music-oriented activities carried out in circle.
The methodology of Circlesinging was first used in Italy by Albert Hera, a musician from Turin, in the educational field, targeting musicians and music professionals. Its use has been extended to different worlds also distant from the artistic-musical one, e.g. in team building projects and in caring environments.
Underlying these forays outside the confines of the artistic world is the strong conviction that art can be a powerful medium in the service of wellbeing and thus of care and caring, whether in groups or organisations, or in people suffering from degenerative diseases such as dementia.
The first experiment of applying the Circleactivities technique with people suffering from dementia was made in 2018 involving users, their families and the operators of the team of the Alzheimer Day Centre of the APSP of Trento. The results were extraordinary: the people involved felt joy, laughed, were moved, and recognised themselves in a relationship of equality, outside the asymmetry implicit in the patient-caregiver relationship. The artistic approach opened up alternative communication and relationship channels respect the usual ones. Therefore the Circleactivities methodology has already provided some evidence of effectiveness on care professionals and older people.
What SOUND Project will add to the previous experience is:
-a rigorous monitoring of the outcomes;
-an international dimension;
-a personal interpretation of the activities based on the peculiarities of the organisations involved in -the study such as for example the use of the piano, of the guitar and different instruments within ----the circle;
-the inclusion of the informal caregivers;
-the engagement of young people from an intergenerational perspective.
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Funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Education and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA). Neither the European Union nor EACEA can be held responsible for them.