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Dr Alan Dunn’s ‘The Jingle Book’, published by The Bluecoat (Liverpool), brings together five years of research into the use of sound within dementia care settings.
Dr Alan Dunn’s ‘The Jingle Book’, published by The Bluecoat (Liverpool), brings together five years of research into the use of sound within dementia care settings. The ‘Where the Arts Belong’ project, a collaboration between Bluecoat and Belong, allowed Dunn and other artists to undertake residencies within care homes and, during Covid, develop online sessions with staff and residents of seven Belong Villages across the north of England.
Originally funded by the Arts Council of England from their ‘Celebrating Age’ programme and The Baring Foundation, the project received additional funding during lockdown from the Department of Culture, Media and Sport to combat isolation. Dunn was one of two artists commissioned for this phase and he began creating online ‘orchestras’ in the Villages, using household objects as instruments and familiar tongue twisters as lyrics.
This work won the Markel Third Sector Care Award in 2022, with presenter Angela Rippon invited to recite tongue twisters on stage during the ceremony. The research featured in exhibitions in Liverpool and Chester, with recorded tongue twisters appearing on the ‘Conversations’ LP and amongst Roman artefacts in the Grosvenor Museum.
Dunn adds: “This has been an incredibly humbling, revealing and unexpectedly enjoyable research project. ‘The Jingle Book’ brings together these experiments with tongue twisters that became a real linguistic leveller between artist, staff and residents and led to Belong wondering whether regular use might improve fluency. The book is both a toolkit and a catalogue, with contributions from our own Dementia Research Centre and some undergraduate Fine Art students, offering tongue twister activities to test out that include the non-verbal, new ones written by a 6-year-old, shorthand, Braille, BSL and even edible. The book comes in a frosted envelope to reference the fog that many people living with dementia describe but once inside, it’s full of colour and tactile surfaces and surprises.”
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