How Can Learning the Harmonica Help the Elderly? An Interview with Bill Fried

Today SevenPonds speaks with Bill Fried, who works with the elderly in skilled nursing centers, assisted living communities, senior centers and rehabilitation centers. He recently picked up playing the harmonica and quickly became passionate about it— enough, at least, to share his love with other seniors.

Credit: Wikipedia

Kimberly: Tell us about your experience as a Harmonica coach for seniors.

Bill: My customer base, if you want to call it that, would be skilled nursing facilities, assisted living communities, retirement communities, and drug and alcohol rehab. For the most part, I teach the elderly how to play the harmonica. The theory is that there is a combination, a tie, between music and memory.

There are a lot of studies coming out now from gerontologists that say memory is first and last out. The memories that you develop and store as a child are there forever. That’s why people, when they become near death, revert back by 20 or 30 years. It’s because those memories are really solid. It’s the later memories that become hazy as we get older and older.

The memories that you develop and store as a child are there forever.

There have been a lot of studies on this, particularly on when seniors sing music that they learned in their youth. For some reason it pauses the decline of memory in dementia patients. In many cases they are able to recover some memory. In the thousands of studies they have done, very few lose any memory after they start singing songs from their childhood.

Kimberly: So your saying that we use music as a mnemonic device to recall information?

Credit: Flickr

Bill: We never forget music. Some people who are catatonic, when put in a group that plays songs from their childhood, will actually join in.

I have a theory about this. When we experience the world, we store the memories that we encounter in a holographic image. That hologram has a sight, taste, touch, smell, and even a 6th sense factor. Any one of those can help you recapture that particular memory. The more focused that we are on an event, the more the sixth senses can take us back to that event. If you want to think of a modern situation, think of when you are driving your car and you are on your cellphone at the same time. You don’t store the information that you have gathered as you are driving on the trip very well because you are talking on the phone, and you don’t store the phone conversation very well either because you are driving a car. Your senses are split and half of your senses are focused on one thing and the other half are focused on another and it’s pretty likely that you are going to have a hazy recollection of both memories.

When we experience the world, we store the memories that we encounter in a holographic image.

Kimberly: How has learning the harmonica impacted your students’ lives?

Credit: Wikipedia

Bill: I had to go back and create a whole new way to learn the harmonica so that I could teach the seniors how to do it. You may laugh, but I call it the ‘Blow-suck-blow-suck method’ and basically it’s to pretend that the harmonica is a soda straw and you have a choice for which straw you need to blow through or suck through. When you blow through the straw, you activate a blow reed that vibrates at one frequency and when you suck through that same straw or hole in the harmonica you activate a suck reed that vibrates when the air comes past it in a sucking motion.

When I devised this method I asked myself what was the best way to get seniors to learn music? The easiest thing is to pick music from their childhood, so I picked things like ‘Row, Row, Row Your Boat’ and ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’. Every American knows those songs by heart. I figured if they already knew the sounds of the music first, all I had to do was write down the notes of the harmonica and whether to blow first or suck first, and they could learn it pretty quickly.

I ask my students if they noticed any differences in their lives after they learned to play the harmonica and here are some of the answers I get:

1. “I love playing. Music is wonderful for me. I can now be all by myself and do new things and play new songs.”

2. “I’m breathing better.”

This makes sense because when you play harmonica, you really have to control your breathing in order to play. I taught them how to stop breathing shallowly, which is what old people do. They breath very shallowly from the top of their lungs, which leaves all the bad air trapped in the bottom of their lungs. But when you play harmonica, you have to breath from your belly. You replace the air in your lungs completely and infuse them with fresh air.

3. I’ve heard some seniors say they eat better too, which I can understand as well because they have more oxygen coming into their body.

4. Another thing is that they say they are sleeping better because seniors often have medical problems with insomnia.

So if you can eat better, sleep better, and feel better, then that’s not bad.

Kimberly: Do you have a lot of structure in your lessons?

Bill: I work with students individually depending on their skill level. If I have newbies, I’ll have them do something very simple. I’ve ordered my songs from simple to difficult. I have an MBA in statistics, so I take a statistical viewpoint and use a formula to come up with which ones are the easiest to learn. “London Bridge Is Falling Down’ happens to be the easiest next to ‘Frère Jacques’.

Kimberly: Is there a noticeable difference between the stamina of the advanced players from that of the beginners?

Bill: Oh yeah, the newbies run out of air right away because they haven’t had to worry about pulling in enough air to get through a song. The other trick I do is to teach on cheap harmonicas, which require much more air than expensive harmonicas.

An expensive harmonica is made of steel or chrome. It’s got very thin brass reeds that are very easy to vibrate, whereas the cheaper harmonicas have thick brass reeds and  are usually made of cheap plastic or metal. I teach my students on the worst possible harmonica, and once they get good, I tell them to switch to a better harmonica. Once they do, the difference is amazing.

Kimberly: How long have you been working in retirement homes with seniors?

Bill: Just about a year. I picked up my Harmonica about a year ago and I thought, what am I going to do with this? I live in Foster City and have a boat out on the lagoon, so my sweetheart and I would hop on the boat and go past restaurants along the water, where I started playing my harmonica for customers. But then I decided that I wanted to do something more and change people’s lives a little bit. Now I can say that there are people who have better lives because of this cheap little instrument.

Kimberly: Do you have any advice for aspiring musicians who are older?

Bill: The harmonica is the easiest instrument to learn beside the kazoo. Since there are 10 holes in a diatonic harmonica, and since you can get two notes out of each hole, each harmonica can play 20 notes. Of those 20 notes, you don’t use the first two top holes and the last two bottom holes all that often, so you really only have to learn how to play 12 notes.

Kimberly: Thank you for taking the time to speak with us!

Bill: Thank you!

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