A music project exploring the impact of music listening and making with AD Dementia patients in care homes, supported by researchers and people in the healthcare system trying to find non invasive solutions and alternatives to drug use.Â
It’s rather exciting to understand how what I do can be linked to very pragmatic problems the elder generation of our society is facing. It has been an eye opener to discover that the healthcare system is expecting a significant increase in AD dementia patients by 2050*.
What can we all do to make the end of our lives more bearable?
The initial project came out after hearing about a research conducted in Australia showing that music and specifically Baroque music was helping to decrease behavioural problems in a care home with patients suffering from Alzheimer Disease dementia (AD dementia). After digging a little more on the subject, it is rather unclear if the choice of music can be universalised. A research in Newcastle does show the exact opposite: playing baroque music to patients there increased behavioural problems and received a rather negative response.
What we can learn from those two research is that listening to music does have an impact, either positive or negative, on the behaviour of patients with AD dementia. To simplify, it makes people react. The studies also show that there is a difference between listening to recorded music and to live music, as well as between passively listening and actively making music. Although, there are very few data and actual protocols reports on the latter.Â
It raises more questions for me, as a musician, but also as a grand-daughter. My grand-father is in a care home, in France, with AD dementia. He is in the early stage of the disease, and has episodes of severe apathy and depression as well as moments where he is still himself - witty and very much alive. He can see himself going, and that is when he gets agitated. I know for a fact that he is not triggered by music, he used to listen to the radio though, he likes political debates and jokes. So I could easily say he is a man of words rather than abstract sounds.Â
What does music trigger? What do we, as musicians, manage to trigger in another human being? We trigger sensations, but also memories. We trigger feelings that are sometimes indescribable and can be very upsetting. ‘It’s too fast, it’s too loud, it’s too much’.
In other words, the famous Proust’s madeleine.Â
Memory is fascinating, but what if some members of the population didn’t have access to making those memories? How to trigger those sensations they had as a child, as a teenager or as an adult? What if the trauma they had in their youth was something they didn’t want to face? I know that the generation of my grandparents went through the trauma of the second world war, and/or the war in Algeria. But can I make out of those informations?
What is agitating positively those patients from Australia, and negatively those patients from the UK? Is it that the music is triggering unwanted memories for the second group of patients? Would the organisation/construction of certain types of music help to reorganise thoughts? Would telling stories be another way in the process of unlocking memories? Why is memory so important for the individual, or for the greater good? Why are we less capable of communication when we stop having memories? Does it make us less of a human-being?
Participating in this project with the Alzheimer Society (Singing for the Brain) and the Armonico Consort is a way to fill (I was going to write feel) the gap between what I can see and what I can do. Because of the current situation, the link with patients is still very abstract for me. I have not been witnessing the reactions to the music I am sharing and it has been a very frustrating aspect of my present 'lockdown' experience. I am really looking forward to being more involved 'on the ground'.
More broadly, being a musician in lockdown doesn’t make sense. I know the videos are viewed but despite seeing the views growing and going up through the roof I cannot feel the impact of what I am doing. I feel blind, or as if playing in a 4 meters wall soundproof box. Strange place to be when my work has always been rewarded by sharing sensations more or less directly through live performances. But this is another subject altogether.
I don’t have answers, only more questions, and I hope being part of such projects helps a little, somehow, to understand how to counteract the memory loss and behavioural challenges our older generation is facing…
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‘One brick at a time’ says my grand-father.
* "A recent epidemiologic assessment based on US census data estimated that, in 2010, there were 4.7 million individuals in that country aged 65 years or older with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) dementia.The same study reported that the total number of people with AD dementia in the US in 2050 is projected to be 13.8 million. Alzheimer disease in the United States (2010-2050) estimated using the 2010 census."
Hebert LE, Weuve J, Scherr PA, Evans DA; Neurology. 2013 May 7; 80(19):1778-83.
Singing for the Brain is a venture started by the Alzheimer Society, willing to 'shape the future services for people affected by dementia'.
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