Unique Warmth for Patients From “Songs in Self-Isolation”

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a variety of challenges to people all over the world, but people are not giving up on fighting against it. Our team met up with Gemma Donn, who started the project “Songs in Self-Isolation” to find out their passion and challenges during this difficult time.

“Songs in Self-Isolation” is a group of musicians in Toronto dedicated to making music videos online to help lonely people. People reach out to the group and a new arrangement of the song will be made in order to be dedicated to their loved ones.

Gemma started the project in the spring of 2020 as a volunteer in the Sunnybrook hospital. Occasionally, she saw a video of nurses singing “Happy Birthday Song” to an old patient, who was not able to see his/her family. She was impressed by the video and wanted to try making similar videos virtually with her friends.

After the first video being released online, they got a lot of song requests. “We created these music videos in order to maintain human connections. Just to remind people that even they are in the hospital alone, it’s their birthday and they’re not forgotten about. Just try to support them to that moment especially when they are hard, as many of these patients were already experiencing isolation in the hospital even before COVID-19”, Gemma said.

The process of producing the music video wasn’t easy. One of Gemma’s friends who plays the piano would record first to form the foundation of the song. Gemma would then record her violin part while listening to the piano part in headphones. “I play along on top of hers and record myself on another device,” Gemma explained. After all the instrumental parts have recorded and edited together, the singer would sing both the melody and harmony parts.

In the beginning, they had some technical problems during the process since matching all parts together was hard. “The video editing is a lot easier now. It’s definitely a learning curve when I first started. I watched a couple of videos, which is helpful,” she said. However, Gemma mentioned that their biggest challenge was staying on top of everything, “when you get a list of birthdays, you really need to be like checking all time to make sure you’re not missing. It’s time-sensitive because it’s kind of weird if you send the video for their birthday a week after their birthday.”

Now, the hospital is going to create an official volunteer role based on her project, which has become the biggest highlight for Gemma, “The ability of people makes videos together and give it to patients would be like an actual distinguish role within the volunteer services. I thought it was nice and they recognize my work in that way. This project makes me realize that I can take my passion to make it into a unique one. It makes me have a bigger desire to help people in my own creative way”.

Check out Songs in Self-Isolation on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pg/SonginSelfIsolation/about/?ref=page_internal