Making music with people

Community music involves musicians working with people to enable them to actively enjoy and participate in music. This can happen anywhere and with anyone, because a ‘community’ doesn’t have to be a geographical one. It can be a group of people who share common interests, experiences, and backgrounds.

Anyone can make music, but often people feel that they don’t have the skills or they need to be talented. Sometimes they’ve simply never had the opportunity or the means to make music. Community music is about co-creating a great experience, where everyone’s input is valued and everyone is included.

Community musicians deeply feel the impact of music

Music can communicate, inspire, excite, motivate, and express a wide range of feelings and experiences, and community music practitioners know this at their core. They are skilled musicians who have had their lives deeply touched and often changed by their own encounters with music-making. These experiences make them passionate, empathic, and highly effective facilitators of music-making in their chosen community.

Community music has proven health benefits. Singing aids breathing in patients with respiratory disease and music can bring back memory function in people suffering from dementia. Music can aid speech development in stroke sufferers and it relaxes people and lifts moods.

Creativity in the hands of everyone

As an organisation with over 800 community musician members, we have the privilege of seeing the rich and diverse music-making projects happening in communities throughout the UK and abroad. Sound Sense members come from all walks of life and work with people in diverse communities such as care homes, hospices, hospitals, schools, early years and special educational settings, prisons, homelessness, in mixed cultural communities, refugee settings, and much much more.

Community musicians thrive on helping people, and whole communities, find their unique voice and express it through music. They are champions of nurturing creativity and understand that it comes in many wild and wonderful forms and will be different for everyone.

Community music in action

To see the inspiring and creative work being carried out by our members both here in the UK and abroad, head over to our Instagram and Facebook pages, where each week we shine the spotlight on and celebrate a different member as part of our Member Monday series.