Drum Circles and the Effect on Wellbeing in a Community Setting

Background: Wellbeing plays an essential role in a complete and health community. Participatory arts interventions are popular to address wellbeing. Participatory drum circles can lead to social resilience, emotional completeness, and mental health benefits. The literature in the field of arts in health demonstrate the specific ways a drum circle may affect wellbeing through socialization, rhythmic entrainment, and expression. Although there are many great resources, many lack the specific tools to facilitate a drum circles as it pertains to specific technique and styles often utilized in percussion in the field of arts in health. Methods: The project used a mixed methods research design. A convergent mixed methods design will be used to collect quantitative data from the Warwick Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale and the qualitative data will be received from a focus group. The results will be compared with the hopes of yielding similar themes. Results: The results of the Warwick Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing scale demonstrate an increase of the average wellbeing score after the four-week intervention by 2.88 points. The focus group’s final themes were 1) the core of the drum circle is driven from the facilitator fostering a strong sense of community that supports being inclusionary, respectful, and social; 2) Learning new skills in a community group benefits participants confidence because a) the curriculum progresses naturally and easily and b) rhythm is an innate and natural part of everyday life for individuals, making drum circles more comfortable.

Noise-Making, Occupy Wall Street, and the Politics of Amplification

This research explores a set of sound technologies deployed during the 2011 Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City’s Zuccotti Park. It examines the People’s Microphone, the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) sound cannon, the drum circle, and the noise complaint. Deepening understandings of their places within the contemporary urban soundscape and their use during the protests, it uses historical research, textual analysis, and qualitative discourse analysis methods to explore the technologies within a larger framework of the city’s discourses around (in)appropriate sound and action. Its findings suggest that each individual technology was evidence for the nature of its user in a way that presaged how the conflict would play out. The microphone epitomized the ideology (and fragility) of the hyper-democratic Occupiers’ ethos. The LRAD suggested the state’s superlative sonic capability and its “monopoly on the legitimate use of noise.” And the drum circles and noise complaints that followed ultimately showed the ways “noise-making” is better understood as a discursive construction that delegitimizes sound. Together, they suggest the ways the hegemonic soundscape serves the status quo. The essay also elaborates a taxonomy of sonic terms, specifically exploring volume, amplification, and noise-making as terms that explain the dynamics of sound during protest. It offers scholars of media activism a toolkit for sound studies that gets at the dynamics and structures of sonic power and explores the way sound-making is a key battleground of modernity. Sound conventions are a way that contemporary society is codified, legislated, and contested.