Three ways music can help build our emotional resilience
The Sing My Own Song participants meet at Hargrave House, in accordance with COVID-19 guidelines.
Recently, participants of the music based Sing My Own Song project met in person at Hargrave House.
We believe music can be a powerful tool to help build emotional resilience, encourage expression and create positive change.
Play and Music therapist Fiona, who leads the project, tells us how the session helped the young people, emotionally, in three different ways:
Creativity
Music, and the creativity that comes with song-writing, can become a new language when talking is too difficult.
Using the wide variety of instruments at their disposal and the loaned mini-mixers, the Sing My Own Song participants were able to experiment with different sounds, musical styles and forms of expression.
Through exploration and experimentation, the young people were able to creatively express their inner thoughts about school, the pandemic and other topics.
Collaboration
The communities that join people together can often be the building blocks to wellbeing.
Belonging to a group of people with a shared interest in music has been beneficial not only for the young participants song writing skills but their emotional resilience also.
Fiona said that: “the real jewel of the day was when the group formed by themselves and collaborated, using their computers and live instruments to form the basis of a song, the bass line, tune and lyrics”
Fiona believes that being together in person after weeks of online sessions has been a learning experience for the young people, many of whom experience social anxiety.
Communication
Music can build bridges between people who may have different ways of communicating or different frames of reference.
The age of the group ranges from 11-17 and therefore participants have very different learning speeds and musical experience, some participants also experience anxiety, and some are neurodiverse.
Whilst this may seem a potential barrier to their communication, Fiona found that “their ages didn’t matter, they used music to communicate equally between them all”