ConnectUs Youth Spotlight EP 12 — Jayden Bang and BandAid: Building Across Borders, One Song and One Conversation at a Time

Woosung
1 day ago
6 min read

Writer: Woosung Choi / ConnectUs Team | 5 min read

South Korea has one of the fastest-aging populations in the world and a birthrate below one child per couple, less than half of what is needed to sustain a population. As that generation ages, Alzheimer's and dementia rates climb. And for many of the people living with those diseases, especially those without money or family nearby, the most consistent form of human contact they receive is a conversation with someone who decided to show up.

Jaden Bang, a senior at Korea International School(KIS), has been that person. He is also a music producer, a neuroscience researcher, and the founder of a global virtual band with eight million views. But all of it, even the memes, connects back to the same thing.

Who Is Jayden

Jayden grew up in California and moved to South Korea at age ten. He has been there for seven years. His three main interests are music, neuroscience, and Alzheimer's disease, and while that combination sounds unlikely, the thread running through all of it is very clear once he explains it.

Logo of Korea International School (Left) and Jayden Bang (Right)

Band Aid:

A Global Virtual Band Built on Memes and Music

Logo and Instagram page of BandAid

Before the research and the volunteering, there was music.

Jaden had been part of a charity band called Band Aid since middle school. The group eventually disbanded, but he kept the name and kept the idea. The turning point came when a friend named Michael posted a video of himself and friends playing a Christmas song on Instagram, stitching together clips from different locations. Jaden saw it and immediately thought bigger.

"I think this is a great idea," he told Michael. "Maybe we could take this internationally."

So he did. Using connections from his international school, he reached out to friends in Thailand, Canada, the US, and beyond. Some joined through personal invitation. Others applied after finding the project online. Their most recent release is a cover of "Hey Jude," featuring a saxophonist from Thailand, a cellist, and Jaden and a friend on trumpet and piano. The group currently spans four countries, with plans to expand.

Band Aid's Instagram reels section has accumulated roughly eight million views. The content sits at the intersection of music-nerd humor and Gen Z sensibility, and it found its audience. The account now has over 6,700 followers. Jaden's philosophy on this is straightforward: if one percent of people who came for the memes stay for the music, that is tens of thousands of potential listeners.

The long-term goal is to build the band large enough to take song requests from composers on MuseScore, a platform where people share original music that will likely never be performed by anyone. Jaden wants to change that.

"There's a music community called MuseScore, and these people post their own music, their own compositions, but they're never going to hear their actual music be played. We want them to have a place where they can say, hey, can you play our music?"

Alzheimer's Research:

MRIs, Cold Emails, and a Paper Under Review

When Jayden's great grandmother died from Alzheimer's, he started asking questions. What causes it? Is it genetic? Why, after decades of research, is there still no clear answer?

"We have some correlation," he says, "but we have no direct causation, and there's no clear answer as to why people get Alzheimer's. And that's scary for me, because if it's genetic, I'm susceptible too."

He borrowed a neuroscience textbook from his AP Biology teacher and started studying on his own during freshman year. Then he did something most people would not think to try. He started sending cold emails relentlessly to professors across the world, roughly ten a day, for a month straight.

Eventually one professor in Toronto replied, inviting Jayden to do research with him. Over time, Jaden learned how MRI imaging works and how machine learning can be used to find patterns in medical data. Based on this experience and his other passions, he eventually wrote a paper on radiomics, the analysis of imaging scans to identify diagnostic markers, and how it can be applied to distinguish between cognitively normal individuals, those with mild cognitive impairment, and those with Alzheimer's disease.

That paper is currently under review at the National High School Journal of Science. Jayden is also planning to present it at an international conference.

Jayden Bang demonstrating the neuroscience textbook he borrowed to study

The Melody Project: When Music Meets Memory

At a summer camp, Jayden met Gemma Wang, who runs the Melody Project, an initiative that brings live music to elderly care homes in New York City. Gemma has been attending conferences and speaking about the neurological effects of music on aging brains. Jayden saw the connection immediately.

"This is such a clear connection with my interest in music and neuroscience. Why don't we make a collaboration?"

They did. Band Aid took song requests from Melody Project members and recorded a cover of "Hey Jude." The plan is to screen the performance for the residents and capture their reactions. A Korea-based version is also in the works, where elderly citizens will be able to listen to Arirang, a beloved traditional Korean song, and hopefully sing along.

Volunteering at a Dementia Home

Beyond the research and the music, Jayden visits a dementia care home. He goes regularly, sometimes weekly. What he does there is simple: he talks to people.

He gave a TED-style talk at his summer program about what he has learned from those visits. His observation is that dementia often strips away the social layers people build over a lifetime, revealing something more direct, more childlike, and in many cases more honest.

One resident stands out in his memory. The man seemed relatively sharp, which made Jaden assume for a while that his situation was not as serious as others in the home. But the man kept returning to the same message in every conversation.

"Make sure you're safe, my son. You look just like my son."

Jayden later learned that the man's son had died very young, after running into oncoming traffic. The nurses also told him that this resident had one of the most advanced cases of dementia in the facility. He was repeating himself without knowing it. But through the fog of a disease that had taken almost everything, that one memory stayed.

"It meant a lot to me thinking that despite that, he still remembered his kid. And that was one of the most important things to him. By doing so little, we can give so much to them."

Share Your Warmth:

The Homeless Who Are Also Being Forgotten

Another initiative Jayden is part of is called Share Your Warmth, which brings food and supplies to homeless communities near Seoul Station every month. The group cooks ramen, brings fruit, juice, tea, and goodie bags, to which people line up to receive them.

What struck Jayden was who was in that line. In the United States, homeless populations include people across many ages. In Korea, the people he has encountered on the street are almost entirely elderly. They are from an older generation and have ended up without the resources to access care. Many, he suspects, have some degree of dementia and no one to help them manage it.

"What about the people who don't have access to living, who don't have the privilege to spend their time in a place where they're taken care of? I realized a large proportion of them do have dementia, and they're struggling massively."

He does not think he needs to fix everything. Often, he says, people just want to be heard.

"I don't even need to respond sometimes. It's just that they want to be listened to."

His Advice

When asked what he would tell an ambitious high schooler who wants to start something, Jayden did not lead with tactics or strategy. He went straight to motivation.

"Find what your conviction is in. Find what your goal is. What's driving you?"

Everything he has built traces back to his great grandmother's death and the question it left him with: how do I make life a little easier for people with Alzheimer's? The music, the research, the volunteering, the homeless outreach. All of it answers some version of that question.

"I think that if you have that, you can do whatever you want."

What Is Next

Jayden is heading into his senior year alongside college applications. His goals are specific: one more research publication, an international conference presentation, Band Aid at 10,000 followers and expanding to more countries, and a shift toward more real-world physical impact beyond the digital audience. He also wants to build a sustainable volunteer structure at the dementia home before he leaves, so that the people he has been visiting continue to have company even when he is gone.