On a stage once presided over by Luciano Pavarotti, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa and Renée Fleming, people living with dementia are recording songs of their own composition.

With the microphones of Glyndebourne opera house capturing every note, their voices rise and intertwine. Not echoing old, familiar tunes but shaping entirely new pieces expressing their feelings, hopes and fears – emotions that, when the music stops, their brains can no longer convey in mere words.

“The public perception of people diagnosed with dementia is that everything is finished,” said Hazel Gaydon, events manager for the Raise Your Voice charity. “But what our excitement is embedded in is the fact that we’ve found musical creativity can trigger original words and tunes based on present and future thinking.”

With the support of Glyndebourne, the Royal Academy of Music, the Alzheimer’s Society and Arts Council England, the charity has spent the past year helping those living with dementia and their carers to compose original, new music for a nine-track CD, Murmuration.

It is the first time any of them have written songs – and the process has unlocked sensations and memories everyday life could no longer reach, the music capturing the remaining threads connecting them to the world around them.

Weekly workshops, supported by musicians, artists and trained facilitators, prompt participants to articulate and share their inner worlds as the inspiration for composition.

Eighty-year-old Colin, in the later stages of the disease, responded to the question: “What are you looking forward to?” with the answer – included in one song – “I dream of going up in a hot air balloon.”

The leading question for another session, “What does music mean to you?”, prompted Barbara, also in her 80s and in the later stages of the disease, to come up with a line that also became a lyric: “It reminds me that there’s a world outside my door.”

Gaydon said these reactions made it all worthwhile: “For someone feeling increasingly closed in by dementia to suddenly understand that there is still a world outside is a moment of beautiful clarity.”

Emily Barden, a professional choral leader, said the work the charity does was “unprecedented”. “Composing song with those living with dementia has never been done before,” she said. “It is an absolutely incredible experience: the participants absolutely blow me away with their creative engagement and willingness to engage.”

The charity’s work has drawn the attention of neurological experts. Chris Bird, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Sussex’s School of Psychology and a director of Sussex Neuroscience, is exploring ways to work with it.

“This project is fascinating and unique: it combines things that we know work about music with the new angle of putting it into song and collaboration,” he said.

“Through the sessions, we have seen that participants’ residual capacity for memory and conversation that were not present beforehand were unlocked by the energising experience of actively creating music,” he said. ‘‘And we saw that effect lasted for a while after the music ended.”

The charity has no wish to expand, but it does want to help others learn from its success. It is now creating online tutorials to help others set up similar groups.

It also hopes to draw the attention of dementia researchers to what they believe is an overlooked form of cognitive and emotional support.

“Our work gives tangible evidence that creative collaboration can provide meaningful cognitive and emotional stimulation,” said Phil Dover, co-founder of the charity.

“The music stands as proof that dementia does not erase the capacity for creation. And that the act of making – listening, remembering and composing – can forge new pathways for expression and connection long after memory begins to fade.”

Jane Haughton, the artistic lead for the charity and a former Royal Opera House singer, said the project had revealed “a surprising gift of dementia”.

“It sounds a really weird thing to say about somebody with dementia,” she said. “But the joy and hope that creating music together brings is so positive and hopeful.

“If people could just capture a bit of the joy that we have in our sessions and bottle it, it would help so many families in our country who are facing such a sad diagnosis.”