Weaving Sound, Care and Belonging: Community‑Engaged Music Practices for Collective Wellbeing
This presentation reflects on music’s capacity to connect people, shape identity, and nurture collective understanding through deeply engaged community-based practices. Drawing on my research on community music, wellbeing and social justice from the past 20 years, it examines how participatory and co-creative music-making can support wellbeing while fostering meaningful, sustained community engagement.
The presentation will feature insights from two community-based music projects led by Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University, that weave music, wellbeing and community engagement through collaborative design and facilitation. The first, Creative Connections, explores how community music can address loneliness in contexts of social marginalisation. Developed with community organisations and participants, the project foregrounded collective music-making, shared decision-making and reciprocal relationships. The research demonstrates how these processes fostered social bonding, mutual recognition and renewed community belonging, strengthening participants’ confidence to reconnect with wider social networks.
The second, Creative Transitions, examines a co-designed music program with women transitioning out of homelessness following domestic and family violence. Embedded in transitional housing, the program prioritises participant-led music-making, community partnerships and trauma-aware facilitation. Through collaborative songwriting, group singing and storytelling, participants engage in identity reconstruction, collective care and peer support, fostering individual wellbeing and emerging communities of practice.
Prof Brydie-Leigh Bartleet
Professor Brydie-Leigh Bartleet FAHA is Deputy Director (Research) at the Queensland Conservatorium Griffith University. For more than two decades, she has led an innovative research program exploring how music and the arts can address complex social challenges and strengthen communities. As a world-leading expert on community music, her work investigates how music making can foster social justice, equity, inclusion, and wellbeing—particularly in contexts marked by entrenched disadvantage, displacement, and division. Professor Bartleet has received numerous competitive grants, consultancies and prestigious fellowships for research conducted with First Nations communities, in prisons, war-affected cities, remote regions, health and education settings. She serves on the Boards of the Social Impact of Music Making (Belgium) and the Queensland Music Festival, is Associate Editor of the International Journal of Community Music and Affiliate Researcher at the Jameel Arts & Health Lab.
Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith University