Sunrise of Vancouver | December 2025
Edward Li (Co-President of Speak With Arts)
When I first began planning our Christmas performance at Sunrise, I wanted to understand what the residents actually experienced when they listened to live music. My original idea was fairly straightforward: prepare short written questionnaires about their musical preferences and emotional responses, then use their answers to understand what worked and what did not.
It made sense to me on paper, but once the performance began, I realized that the questionnaires did not fit the room as naturally as I had expected. Some residents seemed tired, some were unfamiliar with the format, and others simply wanted to listen rather than stop and explain what they were feeling.
So we changed the approach as we went. Instead of relying on written answers, we talked with residents and paid more attention to the ways they were already responding. Some hummed along, while others smiled, tapped to the rhythm, or shared short memories during conversation. These reactions were less structured than the answers I had imagined collecting, but they also felt much more natural.
At the end of the concert, I still wanted to give the questionnaires one more chance, so several volunteers and I approached residents individually to see whether anyone would be willing to complete one. No one did, and the few sheets we collected were blank. I remember being disappointed because I had spent time thinking about what questions to ask and had assumed that written responses would make the residents’ reactions easier to understand. However, when I looked around the room, people were still humming melodies, talking with us, and reacting to the music.
The problem was not that there had been no response. Instead, I had been looking for it in the wrong form.
I also began noticing that familiarity seemed to matter. Residents often responded most visibly to melodies they recognized, even when those pieces were not the most technically complex ones we performed. I could not know exactly what each person was remembering or feeling, but those moments made me more curious about the relationship between familiar music, memory, and emotion.
After Sunrise, we began rethinking how to gather feedback in future programs. Instead of depending on written questionnaires, we planned to try guided conversations, simpler choices, and observations recorded by volunteers. I still wanted some structure, but no longer thought that every meaningful response needed to fit neatly into a form.
That first performance changed what I wanted to pay attention to. I had gone in thinking mostly about how to collect better answers, but left wondering whether the more important skill was learning how to notice the answers people were already giving us.