Digital adaptations to arts programme delivery for people living with dementia in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background: Learning from the challenges and successes of online arts delivery during the pandemic is crucially important for considering long-term sustainable solutions that enable people living with dementia to remotely participate in meaningful activities.

Methods: Twenty-eight arts workers responded to an online survey exploring i) the meaning of face-to-face arts activities that were replicated online, ii) perceived motivations to attend, iii) successes and challenges in adapting arts for online/socially distanced setting.

Results: Responses described arts giving structure and purpose to people living with dementia and their carers, a sense of community, and a way to reduce physical isolation.

The use of technology for arts-based activities in older adults living with mild cognitive impairment or dementia: A scoping review.

For older adults living with mild cognitive impairment or dementia, creative arts-based activities can offer many benefits from enjoyment as leisure/recreation to an avenue to maintain cognitive, social and emotional wellbeing. With growing interest and recognition that technology could have potential to assist in delivering these activities in more accessible and personalised ways, a scoping review was undertaken to systematically examine the scientific literature for technology-assisted creative arts activities for older adults living with dementia. We searched PubMed, PsychINFO, Web of Science, Scopus and ACM Digital Library databases using keywords centering on population with dementia, an intervention using technology, and a context of creative arts, with no restrictions on the type of outcome measured.

Exploring older adult needs and preferences for technology-assisted group music-making. A qualitative analysis of data collected during the participatory user-centred design process.

Purpose: Engagement with arts, recreation and leisure is highly valued by older adults, with positive links to their continued wellbeing. Despite an availability of new music technology, these devices are rarely designed with older adults in mind. This project explores the needs and preferences of older adults in residential care as they interact with digital music interfaces in a group music-making context.

New musical interfaces for older adults in residential care: assessing a user-centred design approach.

For older adults in aged-care, group music-making can bring numerous physical and psychological benefits, ultimately improving their quality of life. However, personalising music-making to optimise these benefits is often difficult given their diverse ages, experiences, abilities, cognitive and motor skills, and their experience with music technology.In this study, we conducted a 10-week group music-making intervention with twenty participants in an aged-care home, using a prototype digital musical instrument that we iteratively refined by following a user-centred design approach from direct resident feedback.

The influence of a conductor and co-performer on auditory-motor synchronisation, temporal prediction, and ancillary entrainment in a musical drumming task.

Interpersonal coordination is exemplified in ensemble musicians, who coordinate their actions deliberately in order to achieve temporal synchronisation in their performances. However, musicians also move parts of their bodies unintentionally or spontaneously, sometimes in ways that do not directly produce sound from their instruments. Musicians' movements-intentional or otherwise-provide visual signals to co-performers, which might facilitate temporal synchronisation.

Neural multimodal integration underlying synchronization with a co-performer in music: Influences of motor expertise and visual information.

Sensorimotor synchronization is a general skill that musicians have developed to the highest levels of performance, including synchronization in timing and articulation. This study investigated neurocognitive processes that enable such high levels of performance, specifically testing the relevance of 1) motor resonance and sharing high levels of motor expertise with the co-performer, and 2) the role of visual information in addition to auditory information. Musicians with varying levels of piano expertise (including non-pianists) performed on a single piano key with their right hand along with recordings of a pianist who performed simple melodies with the left hand, synchronizing timing and articulation.

Cognitive, Motor and Social Factors of Music Instrument Training Programs for Older Adults' Improved Wellbeing.

Given emerging evidence that learning to play a musical instrument may lead to a number of cognitive benefits for older adults, it is important to clarify how these training programs can be delivered optimally and meaningfully. The effective acquisition of musical and domain-general skills by later-life learners may be influenced by social, cultural and individual factors within the learning environment. The current study examines the effects of a 10-week piano training program on healthy older adult novices' cognitive and motor skills, in comparison to an inactive waitlisted control group.

The influence of visual cues on temporal anticipation and movement synchronization with musical sequences.

Music presents a complex case of movement timing, as one to several dozen musicians coordinate their actions at short time-scales. This process is often directed by a conductor who provides a visual beat and guides the ensemble through tempo changes. The current experiment tested the ways in which audio-motor coordination is influenced by visual cues from a conductor's gestures, and how this influence might manifest in two ways: movements used to produce sound related to the music, and movements of the upper-body that do not directly affect sound output.

Negotiating between individual and joint goals in ensemble musical performance.

Successful joint action requires negotiation, especially in the event of goal incongruence. This article addresses goal incongruence in joint musical performance by manipulating the congruence of score instructions (congruent/incongruent) regarding tempo (speed) and dynamics (sound intensity) given to piano duos. The aim is to investigate how co-performers negotiate incongruent instructions for tempo and dynamics by balancing the prioritisation of individual goals versus the joint outcome and how this negotiation is modulated by musical expertise and personality (locus of control).

Integrating optical finger motion tracking with surface touch events.

This paper presents a method of integrating two contrasting sensor systems for studying human interaction with a mechanical system, using piano performance as the case study. Piano technique requires both precise small-scale motion of fingers on the key surfaces and planned large-scale movement of the hands and arms. Where studies of performance often focus on one of these scales in isolation, this paper investigates the relationship between them.

Using historical accounts of harpsichord touch to empirically investigate the production and perception of dynamics on the 1788 Taskin.

This article investigates the extent of production and perception of dynamic differences on a French historical harpsichord, extensively revised in 1788 by Pascal Taskin. A historical review reports on the descriptions of two different types of touch found in treatises of the 18th century. These two touches (loud/struck and soft/pressed) were used to perform single tones on the lower, upper, peau de buffle (PDB) registers (the last of which Taskin is credited with having invented) and the coupled 8-foot registers to investigate differences in dynamics.

Trumpet mouthpiece manufacturing and tone quality.

This article investigates the relationship between the shape of the mouthpiece and its acoustical properties in brass instruments. The hypothesis is that not only different volumes but also particular cup shapes affect the embouchure and the tone quality in both a physical and perceivable way. Three professional trumpet players were involved, and two different internal cup contours characterized by a "U" and a "V" shape with two types of throat junction (round and sharp) were chosen, based on a Vincent Bach 1 [1/2] C medium mouthpiece.