Developing a tool to evaluate Interactive music sessions for people suffering from dementia

1. Developing a tool to evaluate Interactive music sessions for people suffering from dementia • Murray Griffin, Louise Marsland (University of Essex) • Douglas Noble (Live Music Now)

2. Live Music Now • Set up more than 35 years ago by YehudiMenuhin and Ian Stoutzker to support the best of young musicians as they embarked on a professional career, and at the same time reach those in the community who had least opportunity to experience the joy and benefits of being involved in live performance.

3. Type of music • Classical • Jazz • Rock and pop • Traditional music • World music • http://youtu.be/ne2YWGQ2rAA

4. Our mission • We were asked to find out if LMN does what it says it does. • Does it help young musicians? • Do the clients benefit from the performances?

5. Young musicians • Relatively straight forward to find out • We ask them • i.e. we give the young musicians a semi structured interview • Important to acknowledge the often adversarial experience of the conservatoire trained musician

6. The clients • Much trickier. • We can interview them but they might be “unreliable witnesses”. • They are likely to be positive because they like the event. • They are likely to understand the demand characteristics.

7. Methodology • Adapt a methodology used with people with learning disabilities • Video the residents and performers • See all “reactions” as positive • Develop scales for participation social interaction reaction interaction etc • Quantify the instances of reactions • Examine this over time

8. Challenges • To try to capture the potential “uplifting spirituality” of wonderful music performance. • Does this only reside in classically trained musicians? • Might not a very skilled “pub entertainer” who only performs popular music have the same effect? • Can we “do it” with “records”? • Does LMN only work with the middle classes? • Might we not try to educate the elderly and let them experience new things?

9. Future research • Use this pilot to lever more research money to put together a more comprehensive study, across multi sites across different types of music. • To compare the potential different styles of “performance”. • Develop a methodology to try to get to/at “uplifting spirituality”.

10. What do these 3 men have in common?

11. Interesting thoughts • The elderly population is very different generation to generation. • Likely that research on the current residents will be out of data by the time the next generation appears. • Nursing homes themselves may themselves contain more than one generation.