Tala Sound: An innovative interdisciplinary project in social design for health

Music therapy is one of the most useful approaches to address, in part, the dire consequences of age-linked dementia. Building upon such a knowledge, we initiated the development, for Alzheimer patients, of a medical sound system designed around Carnatic Indian rhythms, or talas. We present here an analysis of the time course of a “research by design”, in progress, in order to exhibit its methodological consequences, in particular regarding interdisciplinarity and social factors. Our conclusion is that a new methodological approach to sound-design-based research for health could be built on the creation of strong social and interdisciplinary links among all the stakeholders in the research fields involved. The total value of this kind of project appears indeed greatly enhanced by the main outcomes that an interdisciplinary and social design approach yields, leading to synergies between a priori uncorrelated disciplines such as, in the case of the Tala Sound case mentioned here, health, anthropology, social issues, education and engineering.
JEL code: O330