Recently, we’ve started looking at ways of co-designing musical interfaces with residents based around personal playlists. I tried to come up with a model for a reminiscence profile based around music that would be simple and quick enough for carers/family and residents to complete together. After looking at many kinds of profiles, I distilled something down to one page, based around a preliminary 8-song model, like Desert Island Discs on the BBC. While residents can supply more than 8 selections, with that many, I have a baseline from which to undertake some discography explorations and see if I can find any patterns, related songs, etc. Here is the profile “record” sheet:

Working with this, D. gave Helen and I eight songs to start out with. I researched them and came up with some interesting connections so far:

I have prepared the songs and some lyrics to take back to D to see what she thinks. One interesting question is the importance of refrains versus the entire song and how choruses change and combine in the memory into medleys…