The Sounds of Music group has made great progress on our website, our latency toolkit, and our accessibility toolkits, as well as our pre-pilot program, which we launched on Monday, March 21st, 2022 in order to solicit feedback on relevant areas of our pilot program. 

As the week wears on, we will be focusing on taking what we learned from our pre-pilot program and applying it to a new, revamped pilot program. 

Website:

The website is still a work-in-progress, but we have made significant progress on fleshing it out and filling it with relevant information.

We have an accessibility toolbar on the leftmost side of the screen. 

Latency Toolkit:

The latency toolkit is also very much a work in progress. Curation is our main concern in this regard. We will be adding to it as our research continues, as well as sorting it by a logical navigational scheme. 

Accessibility Toolkit(s):

These toolkits have been compiled on Google Sheets, and need to be added to the website. Raquel is working on creating a downloadable version of the toolkits in PDF format. Again, curation is an issue, but we decided as a team that we will provide information and metadata about each source, in order to facilitate seamless navigation and ease of use. 

Pre-Pilot Program:

We held a pilot program with eight participants, six of whom ranged in age from 82-92.  One of the younger women was a caregiver for a 93-year-old man, and another, a woman in her seventies, has been through multiple surgeries, chemo, and radiation in the last few years, and is relying on a walker at the present time. Two were well over ninety, and both had serious hearing problems and more recent visual difficulties. Others were in their eighties, competent, intelligent people who were beginning to cope with problems of old age while simultaneously affected by the Covid isolation.

We received useful, substantial criticism, and everyone was positive. People found the project valuable and in need of attention for various reasons:

•  It opens roads for further research as people age and populations grow (including a suggestion that we include discussion on research regarding isolation, aging, handicap, etc.).
• It is a terrific and timely idea with opportunities for expansion in many directions.
• It needs structure and continuity.
• It needs to focus on what elderly people will respond to – i.e., music they know and love.
• It requires a knowledge of the population we will serve, and we need to focus on those people and their interests.
• We should pick a genre and not float around with so many different possibilities.
• We provided too many suggestions. Unable to take it all in.
• The program needs a narrative.
• Storytelling set to music is important. When you’re able to “connect” to what’s being played, uneducated music brains are taken to a place to connect with the song/music at a deeper level.
• There’s no better cure for the heart and mind than singing along to what one can relate to.
• The kinks need to be worked out, but the idea is brilliant.

Tasks for the Following Week:

• Create, design, and curate a new, updated Sounds of Music pilot program based on feedback gathered from the attendees of our pre-pilot program (Felicity & Raquel)
• Create and curate an updated collection of musical selections for use in the pilot with special attention to length, video content, and potential connections with our participants (Felicity & Caitlin)
• Continue to develop our visual identity on the website (All)
• Continue to transfer Accessibility Toolkits onto the website (Caitlin)
• Continue to create a downloadable PDF version of the Accessibility Toolkit(s) (Raquel)
• Write and create a new blog post for the website: a list of Related Resources of online musical enrichment programs and activities that we have found helpful (Caitlin)