Carleton professor creates music while healing from brain surgery

Music as post-surgery therapy Carleton instructor recovers from brain surgery, creating a daily music video. CTV’s Peter Szperling reports.

OTTAWA — A music video a day for 40 days - that’s Jesse Stewart’s goal as he recovers from brain surgery.

“I’ll start posting a video everyday on Facebook, in which I play a different musical instrument, or set of musical instruments,” said Stewart.

This past weekend, he posted his 40th video. “It did feel nice to cross the finish line… I wanted each video to be kind of unique and be its own thing.”

Stewart is an associate professor of Music at Carleton University, but this is his first time creating music in over six months.

“I was recovering from brain surgery. I had a brain tumour removed in February, and I was quite sick for six months or something like that before that, during which time I couldn’t play music… a way for me to kind of ease back into playing music, having not played music for half a year or more.”

Making music and posting it to his Facebook page also had another purpose for Stewart.

“A lot of the information that was coming up in my Facebook feed, and in other people’s Facebook feeds, a lot of that information was frightening and depressing.”

So Stewart filled it with videos of him drumming on just about everything. He used a drum set, a cardboard box, and even canoe paddles.

“I would say overwhelmingly, the response was really positive, and actually people did say, I look forward to these videos everyday, so that was part of the goal, and I was happy to hear that it had that affect on some people.”