World Congress of Music Therapy 2026 Reflections
What I'm Bringing Home from the World Congress of Music Therapy
I recently joined 1,400+ music therapists from 70+ countries in Bologna for the 18th World Congress of Music Therapy. Beyond the connection and celebration of the week, I came home with a clearer sense of what's ready to bring into practice here in Australia and a research profile that's now firmly part of the global conversation.
Practice takeaways we are acting on:
MELODIC, a new standardised, co-designed protocol for embedding music into dementia care (Naomi Thompson, Ming-Hung Hsu). I'm reviewing this to bring directly into our clinical work.
A language shift from Diane Austin: asking "what are you experiencing?" rather than "what are you feeling?". A small change that opens up much richer client responses.
Validated tools for awareness in disorders of consciousness, built on the principle that "a lack of observed response does not mean a lack of awareness" (Wendy Magee, Jon Pool, Claire Wood, Dee Gray, Becky O'Connor) this is directly applicable to our more complex aged care clients.
A new musical engagement scale for analysing relational musical interactions. We'll be training in this soon.
New AI-assisted clinical tools for songwriting support and improvisation micro-analysis (Benjamin Good, Felicity Baker, Thomas Wosch), which we're now looking to integrate into practice.
Pain management evidence, including the role of "pleasantness" as an active mechanism (Joke Bradt, Debra Burns) — refining how we frame and structure sessions for clients in pain.
How the week expanded my thinking
Congress reframed the central challenge for our field: we already have strong evidence that music therapy delivers holistic psychosocial and emotional benefit for people living with dementia, their care partners and care staff. The real work now is how we embed it into aged care services sustainably; not just proving it works, but making it stick. A proposal to run implementation trials alongside RCTs gave me a concrete way to think about this for our own program design.
A session on chronic pain and trauma comorbidity also left me questioning how often pain and trauma go unnoticed or unlabelled in people living with dementia, a gap I want to explore further in our own client population.
And the idea I keep returning to: music therapy is fundamentally relational. As AI develops rapidly in and around our field, the question isn't whether it replaces human connection; it's how AI tools can extend the reach of music therapy practice, without diluting what makes it work.
Attuned Health on the world stage
The highlight of the week was presenting my research on MATCH (Music Attuned Technology – Care via eHealth). The presentations drew genuinely insightful questions from researchers across multiple countries, and several conversations are already turning into early ideas for international grant collaborations; a strong signal that this work is shaping the global conversation on technology-enabled music therapy, not just following it.
