Queensland Children's Hospital music therapy marks 30 years of healing through song

In a hospital room where the noise never quite stops—the beeping of monitors, the rush of staff, the hum of machines keeping children alive—a music therapist sits a few centimetres from a ten-week-old girl and her mother, guitar in hand, and begins to sing.

Ruby Carson was born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, a condition so severe that the left side of her heart never developed properly. At three days old, surgeons cut through her breastbone to reroute her circulation, allowing her right ventricle to do the work her left side could not. Now, at ten weeks, she carries a zipper-like scar down the middle of her chest and faces more operations ahead. Her mother, Jade, sits with her in the hospital's bustling corridors, and when music therapist Maggie James arrives with her guitar, something shifts. Ruby settles. She sleeps better. Her body, worn from the work of survival, begins to recover.

This is what music therapy does at Queensland Children's Hospital, and this year marks thirty years of it. The program has touched roughly 750 young patients—infants like Ruby, teenagers navigating cancer, children learning to speak again after brain injuries, kids with cystic fibrosis facing repeated procedures that strip away their sense of control. The science behind it is straightforward: listening to music lowers heart rate, particularly during stress, which increases oxygen intake and the body's capacity to absorb nutrients. For Ruby, preparing for her next surgery before Christmas, every calming moment matters. Every time she relaxes, her body stores energy for the ordeal ahead.

Maggie has been doing this work for twenty-one years. She holds a graduate diploma in music therapy and speaks about her job with the precision of someone who understands that what she does is not entertainment—it is medicine. On any given day, her playlist might begin with "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" for an infant and end with a heavy metal adaptation for a teenager. She learns songs quickly, adapts them on the fly, manipulates timing and rhythm and melody to meet each child where they are. Dr. Jeanette Kennelly, the program's clinical lead and one of Queensland's first pediatric music therapists in the 1990s, recalls working with a twelve-year-old girl recovering from an acquired brain injury. The girl needed to relearn speech. The Spice Girls were popular that year. So Kennelly and the speech pathologist used Spice Girls songs as prompts, watching the girl's neurological engagement sharpen as she sang along, word by word, reclaiming her voice.

The work extends into territories most people never see. Music therapists are called to the bedsides of sedated, ventilated children in intensive care—not to heal them directly, but to help families adjust to the shock of having a child suspended between life and the machinery that sustains it. Music becomes a bridge. In some cases, therapists record a child's heartbeat and weave it into a song, creating something parents can listen to long after their child is gone. Kennelly speaks of a teenage cancer patient she worked with who was also a songwriter. Before he died, he recorded a CD of his own music—songs about family, friends, his hopes, his dreams, his desire to beat cancer. He played every instrument himself, sang every vocal. It became a legacy his family could hold onto.

Evie Smith, nine years old, has had cystic fibrosis since she was four weeks old. Her life has been punctuated by hospital admissions, by procedures, by the repeated loss of control that comes with chronic illness. Her mother, Lee, describes how music therapy helped Evie reclaim agency during the most frightening moments—when accessing her portacath, when facing surgery. Maggie would come to the procedure, and together they would decide: Would there be counting? Would there be music? Evie would choose. The room would calm. Lee watched her daughter smile. Four months ago, Evie started guitar lessons in Chinchilla, a town 250 kilometres northwest of Brisbane. Now she brings her guitar to her hospital sessions with Maggie.

Kennelly encourages parents to sing to their children during therapy sessions, especially infants. Babies love to hear their parents' voices, she says. But many adults have been taught their whole lives that they cannot sing, that they should keep quiet. She tells parents every day in the hospital to sing anyway, in tune or not. Jade Carson insists she cannot sing, so she lets Maggie do it. But Ruby's grandfather sings to her when he visits. And when asked what Ruby's favourite song is, Jade does not hesitate: it is the Brisbane Lions AFL team's theme song. In a hospital where a child's life hangs by threads of surgery and medication and the body's own will to heal, sometimes what matters most is the song a grandfather sings, or the one a ten-week-old girl loves best.