Reimagining digital preservation of music for Alzheimer’s disease: proposing collaborative research going forward
The second online lecture
by DCI 2019-20 fellow
Dr Yunhyong Kim
University of Glasgow
hosted by the Digital Curation Institute, Faculty of Information,
University of Toronto
Thursday, 25 June 2020, 3pm – 4:30pm
Online
The Digital Curation Institute is pleased to invite you to the second DCI research lecture by Dr Yunhyong Kim, Lecturer at the School of Humanities, University of Glasgow, and this year’s McLuhan Research Fellow at the Institute. The talk and discussion will take place online. Access is free, but only registered participants will be admitted – please reserve a place at bit.ly/musicdp.
Abstract
A number of project and research results have proposed music as an effective conduit for non-pharmaceutical intervention for dementia (e.g. BBC Music Memories; Playlist for Life; Alzheimer Society Music Project in Canada; Music for Dementia 2020). These interventions implicitly rely on the digital preservation of music, and on using these resources to design interventions. Current digital preservation practices, however, offers limited support for adopting compassionate design (Treadway 2019) for these interventions, a design principle incorporating dimensions of personalisation, sensory engagement and strengthened social connection.
More specifically, current digital preservation practices do not allow mapping music easily to personal history or perceived preferences of the patient, nor do they reflect the diverse distinctions in auditory attention and cognition, language, music and social/cultural perception, that seem to be central to the context of Alzheimer’s disease. At the same time, the medical research literature landscape also seems to offer little discussion about the contribution of specific selected music in benefiting the design of musical therapy/intervention for Alzheimer’s disease. This seminar invites discussion at the intersection of these limitations, In particular, it explore the selection of music and their patterns as a possible gateway for resolving the missing link.
The seminar concludes by extending this to engage the broader research community and to propose a research roadmap for digital preservation, incorporating interactions between a number of aspects: musical pieces, their musical patterns, benefits to Alzheimer’s disease, and socio-cultural aspects of music.
Speaker
A lecturer at the School of Humanities, University of Glasgow, Dr Yunhyong Kim works across multiple topics related to information management and analysis, gravitating towards areas that bring together artificial intelligence, digital curation, and forensics in the arts and sciences. She has diverse publications in these areas, and is currently leading research in “data forensics and exploration for film archiving and research” as part of the AHRC co-funded project “The Legacies of Stephen Dwoskin’s Personal Cinema”. She is currently supervising PhD projects, for example, addressing, the use of artificial intelligence in the archives, and the role of data analysis for understanding medieval Welsh legal texts, as well as, the broader impact of media and technology in literature and biological sciences. Yunhyong is keenly motivated by multidisciplinary collaborative work, across research, learning, design, and/or even playing music, for example, on the saxophone. She has been awarded a Ph.D in Mathematics from the University of Cambridge, and an MSc. in Speech and Language Processing from the University of Edinburgh.
References
BBC Music Memories https://musicmemories.bbcrewind.co.uk/
Gold, C. A., & Budson, A. E. (2008). Memory loss in Alzheimer’s disease: implications for development of therapeutics. Expert review of neurotherapeutics, 8(12), 1879–1891. https://doi.org/10.1586/14737175.8.12.1879
Playlist for Life https://www.playlistforlife.org.uk/
Treadaway, C., Fennell, J., Taylor A. & Kenning G. (2019) ‘Designing for playfulness through compassion: design for advanced dementia,’ Design for Health, 3:1, 27-47, DOI: 10.1080/24735132.2019.1593295