Courtyard Gardens Retirement Residence | March 2026
Edward Li (Co-President of Speak With Arts)
When we began planning our performance at Courtyard Gardens, I wanted to try something different from our first visit to Sunrise. At Sunrise, I had learned that a written questionnaire was not necessarily the best way to understand how residents experienced music. This time, instead of asking people to fill out forms, we planned to speak with them individually after the concert.
I also wanted to experiment with another idea. Before the performance, we included a short research-sharing segment about music, memory, emotion, and attention. I had been reading about these topics myself and was curious whether sharing a few of those ideas could give residents another way to think about what they were hearing.
I was a little unsure about this part because a senior residence concert is not a classroom, and I did not want the research to turn the performance into a lecture. Therefore, I tried to keep it short and accessible, then let the music do most of the talking.
After the concert, our volunteers spread out around the room and began talking with residents. The difference from the questionnaires was immediately noticeable. Some residents described the music as relaxing or enjoyable, while others talked about learning piano when they were younger or remembered music connected with their families. One person might tell us a whole story, while another might only give a few words.
I began to realize that the goal was not to get everyone to answer in the same way. Instead, what mattered was giving people enough space to respond in whatever way felt natural to them.
Some of the conversations also connected back to ideas from the research-sharing segment, especially around relaxation and memory. I did not see those responses as proof of anything we had presented. If anything, they reminded me that research could explain general patterns, while an individual person’s relationship with music was much more specific. A slide might describe how music and memory can be connected, while a resident could tell me about the piano they had played decades ago.
That distinction made the research-sharing segment feel more useful to me. Rather than thinking of it as something that explained the residents’ experiences, I started thinking of it as something that could help begin a conversation about them.
Courtyard also changed the way I thought about feedback. At Sunrise, I had mostly learned what did not work, while this time I began to see what might work better. Conversation gave us less tidy information than a questionnaire would have, but it gave us stories, preferences, and reactions that I would not have known to put on a form.
I left Courtyard wanting to keep some structure in our future conversations without losing what made them feel natural. Improving the program, I was beginning to understand, did not necessarily mean finding better questions. Sometimes it meant becoming better at following where an answer led.