Accessing Music for Dementia

In recognition of World Alzheimer's Month 2025, Music for Dementia ran a free immersive dementia experience in London on the 16^th September. The experience was designed to spark ideas and inspire new ways of creating products and services for older adults.

Music for Dementia is a charitable programme run by the Utley Foundation that works to make music more accessible to older generations through user-friendly technology, while also campaigning to raise awareness of the vital role music plays in the lives of people living with dementia. As music has increasingly shifted to digital platforms, many older people have been left behind, and the programme seeks to bridge this gap by showing how music can improve wellbeing, provide joy, and help manage some of the more challenging aspects of living with dementia. Music for Dementia’s latest campaign is the Music Made Easy bus, launched to try and encourage people to learn more about the barriers that older people and people living with dementia face in accessing music. The simulation experience is held to understand firsthand how dementia alters your senses and abilities and experience the challenges and frustrations of living with the disease – and seeing how music can help.

“...it creates this very internal, visceral experience that's very confusing. It helps to imagine what it might be like for someone living with dementia going through and experiencing something like that.” - Ellen, Music for Dementia and the Power of Music Campaign at the Utley Foundation.

While it's widely known that dementia affects memory, fewer people realise that every aspect of a person is affected; mood, physical abilities, language, dexterity, and perceptions of sound and pain. Decades of research have shown how music can be an effective treatment for people living with dementia and other neurological conditions, which is why it is so important to encourage people living with dementia to find ways to build music into their lives. “Music accesses the brain like no other sound... there's lots of sounds going through someone with dementia's head because they can't filter out what's going on as they hear everything. But music sort of reacts in a way that is something familiar, especially if it's sounds from when their brain may have gone back to.  So, it's very relaxing, very soothing, and brings back a bit of familiarity.” - Richard, Training2Care
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Dementia friendly music care programmes are already available across the UK, as seen in our Directory, but listening at home should be made more accessible for those who need it most.