A Gloucestershire charity reaching people with dementia through music and song. Mindsong’s singing groups, courses and music therapy sessions offer hope, inspire joy, unlock memories, enhance quality of life, and enable participants and their families to live well.
Our team of 16 registered music therapists, 8 vocal leaders and over 350 volunteers work mainly in Gloucestershire (but we do spill over the borders at times) providing a range of services for people living with dementia, as well as those experiencing lung conditions, Long Covid or Aphasia.
our main services
Music Therapy in care homes
Breathe in Sing out
Music Therapy @ Home
Mindset
Together in Song
Long Covid
Sing 2 Remember
Training for Musicians
how you can help us
volunteers
Our Singing Groups are led by our trained volunteers.
Would you like to join us?
donate
We offer most of our services for free…
which means we need your support.
our funders
He can no longer communicate and is normally unresponsive, but this morning he was taking it all in.’ Those calm words express in a sentence a moment in one man’s life when for a short time, he was lifted by music. A man in whose room the dashing black and white photos of a happy couple’s wedding day hint at the hidden past of someone who can’t now understand the world he lives in. Someone whose stories are locked far away in his mind, long beyond retelling or sharing.
But the power of music to connect is stronger than our ability to reason. Even the wisest and most rational of us cannot really explain what happens when an interval between two notes arouses one feeling, the rhythm of a phrase another. And the memory for melody fades long after much else has gone: in the misty world of dementia, a familiar tune can pierce the gloom like a sunbeam. In those short moments when, playing my violin on my knees by a patient’s bedside, a hint of a smile crosses their face or their hands reach out to move with the music, they and I are certainly lifted beyond understanding to the realm where the musical becomes the spiritual.