As our population ages, the amount of older persons suffering from debilitating neurodegenerative diseases (NDDs) increases dramatically. In NDDs, music can be a powerful tool for supporting emotional, cognitive, and social well-being, but our current understanding of how different NDDs affect the ability to perceive, express, and respond to music and how these functions are preserved as dementia progresses is still poor. In this project, we will (i) systematically map the preservation of musical capacity in all major NDDs, including Alzheimer's disease (AD), vascular dementia, frontotemporal dementia, Lewy body dementia, and Parkinson's disease, and (ii) determine how music-evoked emotions and memories remain preserved across different stages of AD, from mild to severe dementia. We explore these questions in two cross-sectional studies involving 240 participants and using a combination of different musical tasks and modern motion capture, neurophysiological, and neuroimaging methods.

2021

2025