Current Projects
Evaluating the impact of a massive song festival on collective wellbeing
On July 6th, 2024, the 100th Anniversary of the Lithuanian Festival of Song and Dance, a UNESCO Cultural Heritage Event, will conclude with a massive choral concert. Tens of thousands of singers from all parts of Lithuania and many countries outside of it, will perform an artistically imagined set of contemporary and historical folk songs for an audience in the hundreds of thousands. Throughout the week, there will be many additional performances and celebrations of Lithuania’s unique cultural heritage.
Given the surging interest in the impact of the arts on health and wellbeing, an international group of researchers, led by Dr. Indre Viskontas from the University of San Francisco and Dr. Ramune Dirvanskiene at Vilnius University, will embark on a project to assess the ways in which this Festival might leave its mark on participants, audience members and the wider community.
To that end, the project includes three components. First, before and after the concluding concert, audience members and participants will be invited to fill out questionnaires assessing their sense of wellbeing, social connectedness and collective self-esteem. Any changes in these factors will be tracked. During the final concert itself, audience members and participants will also be invited to complete a survey designed to assess the experience of ‘awe’, which is predicted to be a modulator or driver of the transformational power of the performing arts. We suspect that feeling awe is a mechanism by which this event might impact wellbeing and social belonging.
Second, in collaboration with Dr. Ivana Konvalinka from the Danish Technical University, interpersonal synchrony in participants during rehearsals and several concerts will be tracked via research-grade heart rate monitoring. Music has been shown to synchronize brain and body rhythms, and this synchrony can increase feelings of attachment and strengthen bonds between people. We are interested in tracking synchrony using this physiological measure, and exploring whether it can also act as a modulating factor for changes in social connectedness as a result of participation in the festival.
Finally, the third component is a collaboration with Dr. Neta Maimon, of Tel Aviv University, and NeuroSteer's single-channel EEG technology. We aim to pilot the feasibility of adding live brain tracking to the dataset, as well and giving audience members and participants the opportunity to participate in short musical tests designed to pair brain activity with cognitive function in order to evaluate whether life-long engagement in choral activities might be a protective factor from cognitive decline.
Together, these three approaches will yield a rich dataset designed to further our understanding of the impact of a large-scale choral singing event on a number of measures of health and wellbeing.
Can opera bring us closer?
Thanks to a grant from the Renée Fleming Foundation, we’re partnering with Opera on Tap’s Playground Opera project and the PLAY lab at George Mason University to investigate the impact of an opera intervention on 3rd to 5th graders. We think opera has great potential to help kids develop self-confidence, a growth mindset and a sense of belonging. So we’re testing out an intervention to find out if our hunch is correct!
Creativity in College Admissions Essays
Partnering with colleagues at Georgetown University, Penn State, Loyola and others, the lab is engaged in a large-scale, multi-site study investigating whether creativity in college admissions essays can predict success in college and beyond. Secondarily, the project includes using machine learning to develop an automated scoring algorithm that could be used to inform college applications offices and used to make admissions decisions.