The Music Gym

Amongst the squash courts and practice nets at Horntye Sports Centre in Hastings is the Decoda Music Gym, an area designed for experimenting and playing with music and movement. For the physically able there's an interactive bouncy castle, dancing-boards that trigger music, or the opportunity to dance with your shadow on a large screen. For the less able, or less energetic, there are Soundbeams, vibro-acoustic seats and cushions, bubbles, and switches to operate film.

The Gym is overseen by popular local blues musicians Tom Smurthwaite and John Ballard. Its clients range from people with profound disabilities to conventionally able but playful or curious adults and youngsters - but this isn't a mere leisure activity. When administrator Sue Heath invited me to attend one of their regular Friday sessions, I was in for a morning of surprises and learning.

Sue says: "Years ago, as a Relate counsellor, I was surprised to find that mentioning a client was a musician would trigger smiles all round. The label 'musician', I discovered, was taken as shorthand for totally unable to communicate except through his/her music. The film The Commitments bears this out - a band delivering Irish soul music on stage and beating nine bells out of each other in the dressing room."

So why is it that a pair of typical pub-musicians have made such a hit as facilitators at Decoda, working with people with profound and multiple disabilities? How did they come to feel at home with people who find it so very difficult to communicate? And why have they have gone to such lengths over the years to bridge the gaps in those people's lives?

John with his band Night Shift, and Tom (playing under the name of Junior Thompson) are regulars on the circuit of blues-loving pubs around Hastings and make occasional appearances in Europe. They're both life-long blues musicians; singer songwriters with a strong local reputation. Playing in pubs has given them the confidence to walk into any situation and know that they can turn it around. A lack of initial response from an audience doesn't worry them. In short, they can bypass the rituals of polite, social behaviour without embarrassment and without making judgemental responses.

Tom says: "In an open situation, [such as a pub] you're not just playing to people who know you. There are people walking in and out all the time. If people stay, that affects you. Equally if people leave that affects you. Sometimes you're not entertaining in respect of people looking at you, but rather you're creating an ambience."

John felt this was particularly important and something young bands don't necessarily recognise - the need to be sensitive to the feel of the venue, rather than demanding attention and immediate positive feedback.

The Decoda project started with the aim of taking good musicians of all genres into day centres and residential homes. It was an inclusion issue - why shouldn't people with learning disabilities enjoy live music in the same way as anyone else? But not everyone was included - the people in wheelchairs, on the edge of a group, couldn't participate in playing the percussion instruments, they simply had something done for them - bells strapped on their wrists, their hand held around a tambourine.

Gradually the attention shifted to those with the least chance of joining in, with the least experience of having an effect on their surroundings. How to enable them to be more involved? When Tom and John were asked to run a regular workshop consisting solely of people with profound disabilities this question became a real issue. None of the things they had been doing with other groups worked with them. It might keep them, and their staff, amused for a couple of hours but Tom and John wanted to be more than entertainers.

They decided to start from where the people were, to explore how their unconventional gestures could be used to express themselves through music. One of the results of their experiments was their installation of The Soundbeam - a 'keyboard in the air' which turns movement into sound.

Using the Soundbeam meant that a young woman who had no movement other than her eyelids was able to compose music, or a man who constantly jerked his head learned to control this to create the sounds he wanted and then, spectacularly, to sit completely still for twenty minutes. People were now making something happen who had maybe never experienced this before.

Communication requires the ability to make choices and to convey them to others. Tom speaks of a "wordless communication that develops amongst musicians, working together to produce the end-sound, recognising their part in the whole and playing the most compatible part."

So for all their reputation for being social misfits off-stage, pub performers know of more ways to communicate than they are often given credit for. "Playing in a pub," says Tom, "you learn to observe how things are going between yourself and the band plus between the band and the audience. The same is true when working with people with PMLD (profound and multiple learning disabilities); noticing how they become engaged, how they react, and noticing in enough detail to see when they doing something they've never done before."

Such moments can be the key to great progress. B is a young woman who has been a regular visitor to the Music Gym since it started. She has no speech, is visually impaired and confined a lot of the time to a wheelchair. She is also blessed with two support staff who saw immediately the potential of the Music Gym. With their help she tried out the castle, pushed the huge ball, played the Soundbeam and walked, supported, with a metal frame - Tom and John noted that the sports hall allowed a lot more space for this than a house would. On the last day of the pilot project she walked without staff support for the first time in her life. She now enjoys the shadow-dancing as the contrasting images allow her to see her support staff making shapes on the screen.

But what of the people who couldn't be enticed to use the Soundbeam? What of someone with so-called 'challenging behaviour' whose energy could erupt in a disruptive manner?

Sometimes in a pub people feel they have a right to tell you what to play. Tom recalls a man asking for a number while he was actually singing - without halting he managed to let him know that that wasn't the right time AND he wouldn't be playing that. In a rowdy environment it can be vital to turn around stubborn or unrealistic demands quickly without getting into a conflict situation. Tom enjoys 'grabbing' people with something they weren't expecting, something beyond what they think they want. He brings the same attitude to his work with Decoda clients. He's always on the look out for ways to extend people's boundaries, to enable them to experience something new and unexpected.

So the Decoda team turned their attention to clients whose behaviours had previously been seen as wholly negative - something to stop, or get control of. What if someone who liked to punch were given a punch-bag fitted with sensors so that each time he punched it he produced a sound? What if there were a room full of similar devices? Plus space to move around and freedom to choose what to do?

This was the thinking behind the Music Gym. It took another two years to access the funding which would make it a reality, albeit for just one morning a week. The pilot scheme started in October 2005, funded by the local Learning Disabilities Development Fund and run in partnership with MCCH (a regional care-providing organisation).

Part of the funding was for an independent evaluation which found that 97% of questionnaires completed stated that their client had benefited overall from their participation in the Music Gym. 88% stated that the client had developed over time and 72% of clients had tried things new to them. In addition 55% of participants demonstrated sustained learning. These latter points are often not seen as potential achievements for people with such complex needs. It was observed that where staff believed in their clients' capacity to make their own choices and in their potential to develop, they were actively encouraged and clearly benefited. In addition to the activities, clients benefited from the opportunity to participate in the wider community, and from the space that the sports hall provided.

The Music Gym is now an ongoing weekly facility for people with profound disabilities, some of whom travel over 20 miles for the experience. In the huge sports hall they can be as energetic, creative, or simply relaxed as they like as they find their way around the fascinating array of technology, but what stuck in my mind after my morning with the Decoda team was the power of music under the direction of these gifted facilitators.

I watched John charging around with a young man in a wheel-chair, activating a patchwork of sound-emitting mats and boards. There was no pattern to it that I could see and I had no way of interpreting the signals John was clearly getting from the young man - but when they returned to us, and John said to his partner in the chair; "That was great - shall we do it again?" Even I could see the eager 'yes' in the eyes that answered him.