Service-learning Annotated Bibliography

Clements-Cortés, A., Mercadal-Brotons, M., Alcântara Silva, T. R., Moreira, S.V. (2021, July). Telehealth music therapy for persons with dementia and/or caregivers. Music and Medicine, 13(3), 206–210. https://doi.org/10.47513/mmd.v13i3.821

This article from the journal Music and Medicine pertains to the use of telehealth music therapy for older adults with dementia. The COVID-19 pandemic was the catalyst for this article being written, however it lists interventions and considerations for telehealth that would be relevant in any circumstance where distance/virtual therapy is being provided. The authors of the article define telehealth, outline the benefits of telehealth therapies for people with dementia, describe challenges that practitioners may face when delivering telehealth services to people with dementia, and detail music therapy interventions that have been effective using this modality. In another helpful piece of the article, the authors provide guidance on how to ascertain if telehealth music therapy would be appropriate for the client based on their access to and capability to navigate technology. 

Since I plan to develop music therapy interventions that will be filmed and distributed to older adults with dementia for my service-learning project, the interventions that the authors list in this article were of particular interest to me. While some of the interventions described such as pulse marking and songwriting will be less accessible in an asynchronous format, others such as musical games and therapeutic singing will be more realistic for me to consider. The section on singing described a recommendation for the therapist to provide an accompaniment recording for the client to sing over, which seemed that it could be adapted as an intervention for the project I am working on by perhaps singing the verses of the song and providing only instrumental accompaniment for the chorus for the person to sing with.

 Lyu, J., Zhang, J., Mu, H., Li, W., Champ, M., Xiong, Q., Gao, T., Xie, L., Jin, W., Yang, W., Cui, M., Gao, M., & Li, M. (2018, July). The effects of  music therapy on cognition, psychiatric symptoms, and activities of daily living in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, 64(4), 1347–1358. https://doi.org/10.3233/JAD-180183

The authors of this article conducted a study in Beijing, China with 298 older adults who had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease to determine how music therapy would change their cognitive functioning, behaviors, and ability to conduct activities of daily living. The participants were divided into groups – the control group, the lyric reading group, and the singing group. The adults who participated in this study had varying levels of dementia from mild to severe, which is similar to the population that I will be targeting with my service-learning project. The results of this study reflect that music is a helpful modality to improve cognitive outcomes in particular for adults over 65 who have dementia as evidenced by the recorded abilities for word recall and verbal fluency. The music group scored higher on cognitive assessments targeting these behaviors than their counterparts in the control and non-music groups, and this carried over for up to about three months following the conclusion of the intervention being provided. 

From the results of this study, there is a clear rationale for the use of music in particular as an effective intervention for people with cognitive decline produced by Alzheimer’s disease. While this study was not specifically about telehealth or asynchronous interventions, I believe that the implications could still provide an argument for the importance of providing access to cognitively stimulating music activities with older adults such as singing preferred songs and music listening. The highly controlled and quantitative method used in this study give a degree of credibility to the use of music interventions, which can support the activities that I create. Additionally, the fact that therapeutic singing was used as the intervention for the music group provides a direction for what types of interventions might be helpful for the project I am contributing to.