The fundamental question in this study is what elements from my folk music back ground will I bring into my work when I aim to articulate a new sound? I’m a singer, composer and choir conductor based in the folk music tradition.    After a while my research question grew into three directions: composing, shaping of voice and influences from other fields of art.    To re-orientate in my artistic practice I have projected my musical ideas on a fantasy world. The purpose is to find new ways of composing that can be both recognized as folk music and at the same time different from what I used to call my tradition. At the start a fictional world was created with a storyline, and inhabitants with a backstory. This narrative has remained my research ground though the whole project. After some time the ensemble side of the project grew and the solo project diminished.    A new ensemble, Stormsvalan, was formed and interactive collaborative methods became more central. My goal was to create space for both individual and collective work in our performance, in a way that is sprung from traditional music. Together we did twohree live performances, video documentations and a studio recording.    The findings of my study is the long term development of voice personas, and how a fantasy narrative influences performance and ensemble work. In the ensemble we can go further to explore a new soundscape that belongs to my fictional world of new folk music. The findings has arised new questions about metamorphose, voice shaping, music bridge building and the process of artistic research.

The global demographic context of contemporary society is characterized by an increasing percentage of elderly people. In fact, currently in Portugal 22% of its total population is over 65 years of age with an average retirement age of approximately 64 years of age. As a result, it is considered one of the countries in the world with the highest proportion of elderly people, which are consequently labelled as a socially vulnerable group. This prevalent situation presents a current social problem described by the lack of inclusion and sense of meaning among the elders and retired in civil society, shaping the embedded negative attitudes and stereotypes attached to these societal groups as invalid and dependent. In this way, the continuous growth of the elderly population requires the introduction of social organizations, such as the Portuguese social organization The Grandmas Came to Work, centered in the elderly and retiree’s inclusion in society and on their well-being. The main focus of this social organization is to promote ageing as a continuation of development and learning through creative methods and activities, as well as to fill the gap between generations by offering the elderly and retired a place where they can learn from each other, discuss and meet. Hence, this study aims to understand the social and economic sustainability of this particular organization to support the inclusion and well-being of the elderly. This will be done by analyzing the viability of using artistic methods and activities in the context of elderly and retiree's social inclusion. This issue is relevant in the context of Portugal given its predominance of an elderly population and the lack of this group's social inclusion. In fact, it is predicted that by 2050 Portugal will be the country in the European Union with the highest percentage of elderly people (32%) and lowest percentage of working population. This complex issue was studied by using qualitative methods for the data collection, namely through the conduction of semi-structured interviews done to one of the organization’s founders and to its participants. This data provided an updated version of the situation of the elderly and retired population living in Portugal, especially of their possible social inclusion by participating in this specific type of social organizations. The results confirmed the role of such organizations for contributing to the social inclusion of the elderly and retired and for their increased sense of meaning, affecting positively both theirs and society’s perception of the continuous value and contribution of this group. Nevertheless, as what happens in many social and non-social organizations, some limitations were found in the project’s management and respective suggestions were made to face those limitations.