Music's Impact
This spring, I and two others from the class, Shelby and Stevan, volunteered weekly at the Wartburg Senior Center, to work with residents to see how music affects them. We used general playlists onoriginally, and then figured out what songs the residents liked after playing the playlists for them. We started out with a few people, and grew to have regular listeners. The residents came in all shapes and sizes; one was a man who was missing a leg, another was a woman who has been in a comatose-like state since she was a teenager (she is in her 30s), and another woman was blind. However, they all enjoyed the music and I would like to believe that we helped them to reconnect with their past by giving them tailored music to listen to.
We got many reactions from the residents. The man with one leg was happy with almost anything, but we mostly gave him old gospel that he would have listened to when he was younger. He would tap his one foot, and just smile with glee as he held tight to his iPod. The woman who is in a comatose-like state could not speak could or move much, but did have rapid eye movements, and also would try to smile when listening to the many Grateful Dead songs we put on her iPod. The blind woman seemed to have a lot of pain, but did calm down significantly when we played The Four Tops, Michael Jackson, or some other popular 80s upbeat tunes. One of my favorite responses came from an adorable man with huge glasses. He could not say much that we could understand, but he loved to dance and would stomp his feet and shook his arms and hands rhythmically when he listened to music he remembered. He was also very expressive with his emotions and would laugh or cry when he felt these recollective emotions that were generated by the music on his iPod.
Overall, though these people were constrained to wheelchairs, that did not stop them from expressing their feelings in correlation to their memories of the songs. They danced in their own way, and the music made great strides in bringing them out of their sometimes sad states of being (looking into the distance, their head down, not being present). They felt something, and the music brought them back to the emotions they felt when listening to that particular song. Volunteering at the Wartburg really was amazing because we could see how we impacted these people's lives by making their days just a little brighter by plugging in the iPods, putting their headphones on, and letting them take time to just listen.
8
THE IPOD PROJECT
A man at a nursing home listens to music to lift his spirtis and bring back old memories