Summary

The Awesome Music Project is a charitable foundation that leverages the healing power of music to address mental wellness and mental health challenges.

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, music therapists and their clients faced a unique set of challenges. With many senior clients being immune compromised, many MT’s stopped offering sessions, or had to move their sessions online. Aside from a number of limitations and technical issues, without a face-to-face interaction it was more difficult for clients to connect, focus or engage.

Our team connected with The Awesome Music Project to come up with a web platform that would address the needs of online music therapy sessions.

My Role

For this project I paired with Roche Lynch, Ed Valenzuela and Elaine Wang. Together we collaborated on research, brainstorming, prototyping and testing.

The Challenge

Build a web-based platform that will address the needs of Music Therapists offering online sessions for Senior Care Facilities.

Chart timeline: includes ideation, interviews, user stories, secondary research, competitive analysis

How might we develop an accessible co-creating platform for music therapists to have engaging sessions with their elderly clients?

Research & Exploration

With our leading question, each of us collected desk research and conducted interviews with music therapists and caregivers.

Key Findings

Latency issues, and technical difficulties can interfere with the flow of a session. Frustration is experienced for both the MT and the client.
Music can trigger good or bad memories. Its important to monitor expression (which is limited on screen).
Rhythmic movement plays a vital role in sessions. Some MT’s found it challenging to achieve that level of engagement over video.

Bullseye priorities map. Features to avoid, features to reach mid fidelity and features to reach the highest fidelity

Features sorted on sticky notes according to impact. Some impact, medium impact and crucial impact.

Session Goals

Top goals in a session often include treating anxiety, boredom, depression, and loneliness. Along with pain management and connecting to self.
The ability to provide asynchronous material would help to reach and support more clients. (Sometimes there is a single MT providing services to an entire hospital).
Individual sessions are about diving into one persons specific needs. Whereas a group session may focus on building social connections. Providing both options is ideal.

Testing & Iterations

Key features we explored:

Motion control visuals
Background images
Ambient sound settings
Client database

image of unity prototype: drawing on the screen creates sound

Feedback

Early on we played with the concept of creating sound with motion detection, gestures, and digital instruments.

Using prototypes made in Unity, we learned that the participant loses interest quickly if the prototype creates noise without rhythm. We realized that these options run the risk of creating annoying or distracting sound patterns.

Overlays were interesting to participants momentarily, but required further iteration to build curiosity. We later focused on motion sensitivity, using filters to effectively incentivize rhythmic movement.

Image of bubbles overlayed on the screen of a video call

Image of a facetime call with a man changing the virtual background from a beach to a brick building

Virtual backgrounds (specifically locations that were familiar to participants) sparked memories, which led to life stories and rich conversations. This was a feature we decided to lean into.

Implementation

In the final prototype we included:

Visual Effect Filters

Incentivize dancing and movement with visual effects that respond to motion. The responsiveness of this feature is easily adjusted.

Equalization Settings

Adjust the audio parameters to replicate distinctive sound characteristics of a specific scene. ie: a cathedral, recording studio, jazz club, or open field festival.

Backgrounds

Add background images to set a scene that provokes a positive memory, story or emotion.

Image of the Duet platform featuring the filters, equalization settings and background filters

image of duet platform featuring the video settings and location of client details button

image of duet platform, featuring the client details pages

Conclusion

Throughout this project music therapists guided our approach with detailed insights into session goals and challenges.

We focused on enhancing the music therapy experience without completely altering the existing structure. In doing so we discovered opportunities to make music therapy more accessible to everyone.

Duet