Andy Tubman leads a group of SingFit participants
Founded in 2014, SingFit is an innovative app that enables healthcare professionals, caregivers and individuals to facilitate therapeutic music, even if they have no previous musical training. An AgeTech Collaborative™ participant startup, SingFit offers a range of products designed for group and one-on-one settings.
Andy Tubman, co-founder of SingFit, took some time to tell us more about the company and his journey to becoming a music therapist.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Would you introduce us to yourself and your startup?
I’m Andy Tubman, co-founder and chief clinical officer of SingFit. We’re a therapeutic music company created by technologists and music therapists; our app uses active music-making as a health benefit. The majority of our programming has been in senior care and with folks with dementia, and we’re now expanding into many other fields, populations and diagnoses. All of our products are designed to get people actively singing and moving. There are lots of different applications, if it’s pointed intelligently at different conditions such as dementia, anxiety, stroke or pulmonary challenges.
How does the app work? Is it like a fancy karaoke machine?
It works like speech therapy or music therapy. For example, if someone was in speech therapy after having a stroke, the therapist might say the word “blue,” then the patient would repeat the word. In music therapy, this process might be finding a song with the word “blue” in it, then the therapist would cue that word as the song plays and say, "Here comes ‘blue,’” so the patient could sing it.
What we’ve done at SingFit is digitize that word-queuing process. Our music is composed of four tracks; one track is the lyric coach, which are spoken words that feed you the lyrics prior to hearing them in the music. Another track is a guide singer, and that’s just like singing along to the radio. The third track is the music, and the fourth track allows you to record yourself singing, and it automatically mixes out the lyric coach and the guide singer so you can share the recording on social media or with loved ones.
It’s a very simple process, all done through our app on your phone or tablet.
I’m really curious about the science of this. How does it work?
Everybody knows that music has a powerful effect; it has an element of mystery. The challenge is: How do you actually use the music functionally to help people exist in a happier state of being? Time is always moving, and energy is flying all around — but music helps organize things on a “grid” with melody and lyrics and memory experiences. And whenever you sing with intent and understanding, you're starting to create positive outcomes.
How does SingFit help that happen?
We have a suite of products to help with a one-on-one process with dementia and other medical conditions. Caregivers are trained to know a person’s go-to songs — let’s say they’re “Blueberry Hill” and “Autumn Leaves”. The caregiver might see a person with dementia becoming agitated, so they’d start playing “Blueberry Hill” before their agitation increases.
In that case, you’re trying to calm somebody down, so it might seem counterintuitive to play “Blueberry Hill,” because it has that pulse and that deeper, heavier engagement than “Autumn Leaves,” which has a mellower sound. But what you actually want to do is match the person’s energy. So if they're agitated, you start with that higher-energy song, then move away from that as the person gets more organized. There are different processes for people with different conditions, such as a stroke. But whatever the scenario, you’re using SingFit to adapt functionally to have the highest level of engagement in the singing process, which gives that whole-brain workout.
Can you tell us the origin story of SingFit?
I got into music therapy when one of my best friends went through a windshield the day before college started. He went into the ICU, and it looked like he was going die. Eventually, he stabilized but was in a coma. A few months later, they had a visiting night for friends and family, and I brought my guitar, because I’d heard that people in a coma can still hear, and that it’s a positive stimulus. I had just learned Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here,” so I played that opening riff — and right then my friend came out of the coma, mouthing the lyrics to “Wish You Were Here.”
I have some serious goosebumps right now.
Right? Everybody in the room was just in tears. And the nurse came up to me and asked, “Hey, do you know what music therapy is? We have a really good music therapist I think you should talk to.” That’s how I ended up going to music therapy school, and that’s the inception of the therapeutic side of the company.
On the technology side, my dad was an opera singer in the 1960s and ’70s. He was also an inventor, and he wanted to create a way that he could learn a libretto in an easy fashion. In those days, they had a guy called an “opera prompt” who would be behind the shell on the stage, prompting the singers if they forgot the words. So my dad wanted to invent a way to do that in the car, so he could learn librettos while he was driving. But the technology for that didn’t exist.
Fast-forward a few decades when the app economy exploded. I was talking with my sister, who was in tech, and we said, “You know, dad’s idea is an evidence-based practice in music and speech therapy, and now the technology can make it possible.” So we decided to do it.
How has working with the AgeTech Collaborative™ helped SingFit?
It's been great in a number of ways. For example, due to COVID we created a new product called SingFit TV, and the Collaborative did a brilliant job getting us powerful feedback on that, and fast. I’ve learned that big companies in this space often do not move quickly, but that was not the case at all with the Collaborative. That feedback showed us there is an absolute, definitive need for solutions like this in the marketplace, and it helped pushed us strategically in a new direction.
You can learn more about SingFit at their website.
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