The impact of active musical engagement on health, well-being, and social integration within community music interventions has been systematically explored in recent years. The vast majority of related research focuses on special populations with heightened support needs regarding their mental and/or physical health, or on social groups experiencing conditions of exclusion.

Given that community music encompasses inclusive activities, where the concepts of hospitality and prevention are of pivotal importance, we decided to investigate a particularly successful music program which is open to all members of the local community and has been implemented on a long-term basis in Crete. The program, entitled "The Art of Rhythm," combined musical creation with percussion, including movement and vocal performance.

The aim of our study was to examine the role of music in the participants' lives before and after the intervention, and specifically the effect of active musical participation on mental disposition and emotional regulation. A mixed-methods approach was employed within the case-study framework, which involved administering questionnaires (B-MMR, Well-Being Index (WHO-5), and a short purpose-made positive psychology questionnaire) before the start and after the end of the intervention (N=107), as well as conducting a focus group after the program's completion.

This presentation offers an initial depiction of the quantitative research findings, which indicate differences before and after the intervention, most notably an increase in the impact of music on the participants' mental disposition. Furthermore, through thematic analysis of the interviews, we explore how active participation in the musical process was experienced as a form of care that participants progressively internalised and used for their well-being.

• Music and communities

Christiana Adamopoulou, PhD (Ionian University), MA in Music therapy (Anglia Ruskin University), BMus (Ionian University), is a music therapist and Specialised Educational Staff at the Department of Music Studies, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. Christiana holds a Diploma in piano performance, and she is trained in group psychoanalytic psychotherapy.

Eri Mavropouly is a music teacher, musicologist and PhD candidate at the Department of Music Studies, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She obtained her first degree at the University of Athens, and then did a postgraduate course on Theory, Practice and Evaluation in Education at the same University. She has presented her work on teachers' burnout in various conferences in Greece and she has been awarded a conference prize in the 8th International conference on Society, Education and Politics (IAKE) which took place in Herakleion, Crete in 2022.

Yiannis Papatzanis has collaborated with musicians from many countries and has been a close associate of leading artists (such as Ross Daly, Giorgos Xylouris, and Psarantonis) for the past 25 years, playing percussion and singing. His vocal repertoire is rooted in Cretan music, but he also explores musical idioms from other regions of Greece. Yiannis develops techniques for Aegean traditional percussion (toumaki/daoulaki) while also incorporating percussion instruments from other traditions. He has composed original music for theater, cinema, dance theater, documentaries, and television productions.

Christina Anagnostopoulou is an associate professor and director of the Music Cognition, Computation, Community Lab at the Department of Music Studies, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She has also taught at the Universities of Edinburgh, Glasgow, and Queen's Belfast on various topics related to music analysis, music informatics, cognition and artificial intelligence.