Beatie Wolfe

If this music could talk, what would it say?

And that's almost how I find the right way of bringing a voice into that environment.

It feels like a self as opposed to an ego, perhaps.

But there's something lovely about not...

actually having opinions about these pieces and seeing what people feel themselves and not giving anything that would inhibit or distract from that.

It's somewhere in a space of being meditative and calming and maybe in a way encourages sort of transcendental spaces, but also isn't imposing and somehow still stirs something.

I think music, the point of music is to remind us of who we are, who we really are, and not who we think we are or we think we should be or society has told us to be.

I think music cuts through all of that and it goes to something very deep inside of us, which is our...

let's say, our true self, you know, and it bypasses all the other shit, really.

So I came across Oliver Sacks, neurologist Oliver Sacks' musicophilia in 2014, I think, or earlier.

And I was so struck by how music...

activates almost the entire brain, you know, which is why when people have neurological conditions, it can bypass affected areas and, you know, hit somewhere else.

You know, he made cases for its use across all these different conditions.

And at the time, I didn't particularly think, oh, I'm going to go off and do work in this area.

It wasn't even remotely a

in my mind and then I found out that my family members were coming into the early signs of dementia and then rapidly progressing.

So I thought, well, whenever I'm going to see that family member, I will take my guitar and I'll play some songs and maybe it will have a neutral or potentially positive effect.

So I went to visit this relative in Portugal and I had asked, you know, the care home director, look, can I play some music to this loved one?

And he said, yeah, but actually, would you mind playing to everyone?

So it was 40, 50 people and I was playing these new songs, you know, I'd written.