practical living
In tune
with
dementia
Innovative music therapy
is giving voice to the
concerns of people with
dementia and their carers.
Imogen Clark interviewed
by Dallas Bastian
S
ongwriting to improve relationships between people living
with dementia and their families. Group singing to foster
connectedness. And personalised playlists to increase
physical activity.
These are some of the ways Dr Imogen Clark from the University
of Melbourne is exploring the potential of music to improve the
health and wellbeing of older adults.
Clark was recently awarded a $50,000 Hazel Hawke Research
Grant in Dementia Care to investigate the potential of group
songwriting as a means for improving social connection, mental
health, wellbeing and quality of life for people with dementia and
their family carers.
At the 15th World Congress of Music Therapy in Tsukuba, Japan,
last year, Clark discussed two other music therapy research projects
and concluded that innovative music therapy interventions can play
an important role in addressing ageing policy and may reduce the
burden of age-related healthcare to society.
Aged Care Insite spoke with Clark about the ways music therapy
ties in to preventive health among older adults and living longer
better, and her current research projects.
ACI: One aspect of music therapy you examined recently
was the potential for music listening strategies to improve
participation in physical activity among older adults with
18 agedcareinsite.com.au
cardiac disease. What do these strategies involve and how
might they help older adults?
IC: We investigated how the impact of walking with particularly
selected music playlists might help people with cardiac disease
to meet the physical activity guidelines. So, to be able to walk for
150 minutes a week, or about 30 minutes on most days of the
week, which is the general guideline. We all want to do this, and
sometimes motivation can be pretty tricky, but it’s critical for people
with cardiac disease to do those 150 minutes.
So what we did was put together personalised playlists. One
might think, “Oh, well, anybody can sit down and create a list of
songs for listening to while you go walking,” but for older people
who are not necessarily as connected with technology, this is not so
easy, so there was that more practical component.
In addition, what we were finding was that the needs, in terms of
what music older people would select for exercise, were incredibly
different to that normally chosen by younger people. Our previous
research with younger people showed that high-tempo music –
say more than 120 beats with a stimulative melody and harmonic
structure – would be beneficial.
But with our older people, we found it was important for me or a
music therapist to sit down for as long as a couple of hours or more
to run through and create this playlist.
The songs that were most effective for people tended to be those
that created associations with their younger life, so perhaps songs
from their earlier adult years, and these songs might have been quite
slow. We might look into them and think they seemed quite relaxing,
but for that person it reminded them of when they were stronger
and more resilient and able to walk without any problems, and didn’t
have concerns and fears about perhaps having another heart attack.
In that way it was more important that the music was a distracter
rather than a stimulant.
We did find that people who walked with their music playlists –
which were carefully selected considering their life experiences and