Dr Simone Marino, Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Social Care and Ageing (SAGE) Futures Lab, Edith Cowan University (ECU)
Dementia has become an epidemic with numbers projected to rise exponentially.
In Australia, this number includes people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds (CaLD); and such diversity presents challenges to service delivery.
The existing literature reports that many existing aged care services in Australia do not adequately address the needs of Australia’s culturally diverse ageing population, particularly around ‘cultural safety’. Similarly, the Final Report of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety reported a lack of community support and social stimulation for individuals living with dementia, especially those from diverse backgrounds.
The Co-musichiamo project was inspired by the scarcity of studies involving people living with dementia from migrant backgrounds and their families, as well as the lack of appropriate services and resources to support their cultural wellbeing. Developed in collaboration with Professor Loretta Baldassar (Director of the ECU SAGE Lab), this project is located at the intersection of anthropology, ethnomusicology, ageing and dementia studies.
Co-musichiamo is a neologism evoking both the Italian term comunichiamo – ‘let’s communicate’, and musichiamo – ‘let’s make music together’. Co-musichiamo explores the relevance of music, migration life-storytelling, and first language to support the wellbeing of people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds living with dementia in Australia. This innovative idea uses reminiscence and autobiographic memory through the collection of oral histories with Italian migrants living with dementia and their families, both at home and in residential care, to co-create culturally tailored songs that support cultural identity and wellbeing.
Through a series of sessions involving participants and their family members, migrant stories and oral histories are collected, together with the soundscapes and individual soundtracks of participants’ lives, to co-create a song together. The songs feature the ipsissima verba – the very words that we all use in our narrative – which define the identity of a person, playing a pivotal role for their cultural memory and wellbeing to leverage identity. Music is known to release stress and nostalgia, reconnect socially, and facilitate retrieval of cultural memory. It is also a cultural strategy for the ‘loss of presence in the world’, as it is via the senses, that people can access ‘the original opening’, situated in one’s world.
The preliminary results of Co-musichiamo show that the co-creation of culturally tailored songs, composed and sung with the participants in their first/home language, can enhance physical and social engagement, and contribute to the general well-being of people from migrant backgrounds living with dementia. Participants demonstrated improvement in mood and increased communication.
Dementia Australia is very supportive and interested in the innovative idea of Co-musichiamo and the development and implementation of a music engagement intervention research project in residential and home care aged care settings.
*The views and opinions expressed in Knowledge Blogs are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of ARIIA, Flinders University and/or the Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care.
About the author
Simone is based in Adelaide and has been a lecturer for more than 10 years at the University of South Australia, teaching sociology, migration and identity studies, and Italian studies. He is currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Social Care and Ageing (SAGE) Futures Lab at Edith Cowan University (ECU). His work in this role focuses on implementing social science approaches to support the development of social and community care interventions for the ageing and aged care sectors, with a particular focus on dementia.