For this first blog post, I had to step a bit outside my comfort zone because we’ve started collaborating with sound designers on a music interface. That alone is already an interesting project. For the first blog post we had to research on nime.com and I came across a study about agency and creativity in musical interaction for people living with dementia and cognitive decline. I find this topic really interesting, especially since it connects in some ways to what I’m considering exploring in my master’s thesis.
Agency and Creativity in Musical Interaction for those living with Dementia and Cognitive Decline
Dementia is an umbrella term for a range of progressive conditions that affect the brain. These conditions can cause challenges with memory, problem solving, cognitive function and decision making. For people living with dementia, musical interventions have been shown to support important aspects of life, such as the sense of self. Sustained engagement with music can have a positive impact despite these challenges.
In this context, agency refers to the sense of control or ownership an individual feels over their actions and the resulting consequences. It describes the experience of being the initiator of one’s actions rather than just responding to external direction.
For people living with dementia, agency is often considered to be diminished. In research, dementia is frequently approached through a biomedical deficit model that focuses primarily on the skills and memories a person has lost. This perspective can lead to the assumption that because language and memory are impaired, agency must also be lost. However, this connection is often taken for granted rather than critically examined.
As a consequence, people living with dementia are frequently viewed as passive participants in therapeutic activities and are often expected to engage only in relatively basic tasks. In the study referenced, for example, participants were limited to playing simple instruments such as percussion while following the lead of experts. This setup reflects and reinforces the assumption that their role is primarily responsive rather than self-directed.
Biomedical deficit model
The biomedical deficit model is a framework commonly used in dementia research that focuses primarily on the skills lost by individuals and the tasks they are no longer able to achieve. This model prioritizes the identification of cognitive impairments, such as challenges with memory, language and problem-solving.
This paper proposed and tested a procedural music platform called the “SliderBox”, which was specifically created for people living with dementia. The goal of the project was to allow people with dementia to go beyond basic interactions to create sound and provide tools that facilitate unguided musical experiences and enabling them to actively participate music activities.
The Hardware: The SliderBox is an accessible MIDI controller made of wood, with eight analogue sliders and eight push-buttons. It provides multi-modal feedback through LED light strips and buttons to help guide the user.
Conclusion
Some participants were struggling when there were more then two possible actions. This also directly related to the engagement, whereas less people would engage with the prototype, when it had to many possible actions.
The researchers also observed that the SliderBox had a high engagement and lack of negative behaviors, showing the potential for those platforms.
In this experiment concludes that it is absolutely possible to facilitate engaging musical interactions that also foster agency and creativity for those with cognitive decline.
Sources
[1] J. Pigrem, J. Christensen, A. McPherson, R. Timmers, L. de Witte, and J. MacRitchie, ‘Agency and Creativity in Musical Interaction for those living with Dementia and Cognitive Decline’, in Proceedings of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression, 2024, pp. 315–323.