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  • Musicians singing and playing the guitar.

    Music Engagement.

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Music and Arts Engagement

Our research explores evidence-based models which create a nexus between music-arts, health and community interaction. Innovative interventions aim to enhance quality of life through collaborations between musicians, community members, and health providers.

Our projects that respond to this area of critical need include:

Comusichiamo

Comusichiamo is a music engagement project for Italian people living with dementia in aged care facilities.

The term “Comusichiamo” is a neologism evoking both the Italian term “comunichiamo”, “let’s communicate” and “musichiamo, “let’s make music together”.

Led by Dr Simone Marino, the project is located at the intersection of anthropology, ageing, music therapy and dementia. It uses participant observation and the collection of oral histories to co-create a song with participants and their families.
Comusichiamo aims to stimulate cultural memory and mental activity through emotions that participants re-experience by engaging with music. It seeks to strengthen the wellbeing and cultural identity of Italian migrant aged care residents living with dementia and various degrees of cognitive impairment.
This novel methodology addresses a critical gap in existing aged care support programs. Comusichiamo will be further developed and offered to a range of people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds (CaLD) living with dementia in Australia.

Dr Simone Marino playing guitar to an audience.

Identity and wellbeing through music engagement

Music engagement through learning, performing, creating, sharing and/or just listening as a leisure activity enables individuals to connect to their cultural backgrounds, traditions and values. Music engagement in many migrant communities is an activity that is often passed from one generation to another. It is a way to foster cultural identity, construct the self, portray self to others and connect with the sociocultural environment. These processes are interlinked and reciprocal and subject to the individual’s resilience and wellbeing.

Australia is becoming a more and more culturally diverse nation with more than 300 cultural and ethnic groups, and has attempted to embrace multiculturalism and cultural diversity as part of its national identity. However, a variety of socio-cultural conflicts and physical, emotional and mental health challenges exist in immigrant communities.

This ethnographic study, led by Dr Manonita Ghosh and Dr Simone Marino, will explore the ways music engagement supports interactions between the generations, creates and safeguards socio-cultural identity and in turn helps maintain wellbeing in culturally and linguistically diverse (CaLD) communities in Australia. The findings will inform the key positive effects on the social, cultural and environmental determinants of health in two generations in CaLD communities as a result of music engagement. The findings will be used to establish a framework to guide the development of a culturally appropriate music engagement model aimed at fostering intergenerational communication and resilience and enhancing the wellbeing of multicultural community members.

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