Who is Allison?

Education and Professional Career

Allison is the founder and co-director of online company ‘Allison Davies, Music and The Brain’ . Her primary role is to educate teachers, parents and service providers to use music as a regulatory tool and to implement trauma informed and neuro-affirming frameworks into their homes, schools and workplaces. She is a former Neurologic Music Therapist with 16 years experience in clinical and community settings, an award winning autism advocate and educator and international keynote speaker.

Allison holds a Bachelor of Music and Bachelor of Teaching (University of New England, 2003), a Master of Music Therapy (University of Queensland, 2005) and Neurologic Music Therapy training (Academy of Neurologic Music Therapy, 2016). A former Registered Music Therapist of 16 years, Alli left the Allied Health industry in 2021 in order to align her work more deeply with culturally responsive practices and to switch her focus from individual change to socio cultural change.

As a registered Music Therapist Alli made relationships with and delivered services for mental health organisations, the education department and the aged care sector. She delivered group & 1:1 therapy primarily in early childhood support, youth detention, neuro rehabilitation, dementia and palliative care.

Alli is an Autistic ADHD’er and Synaesthete and has focused her career on helping to reshape systems to make them safer for intersectional folk and minorities. She is highly skilled in trauma care, disability advocacy and cultural responsibility and sensitivity, and ensure that these inform the foundations of all elements of her work. Her work goals are regulatory in nature and focus on self efficacy, self actualisation and felt safety over behavioural outcomes and improved or developed skills.

In 2024 Allison Davies, Music and The Brain was awarded Telstra Best of Business Award, Tasmania.

Allison is a regular contributor to online network ParentTV, and radio station ‘Vision Australia’.

She lives in the rainforest of Lutruwita/Tasmania, with her husband and 2 children, where she enjoys the beach, the bush and baths.

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Tasmanian Winner,

2024 Telstra Best of Business Awards.

  • As a former music therapist I have benefited from the institutionalised education of universities, and continue to engage in and benefit from colonialism in the ways of Western music making and experiencing, within a very narrow and whitewashed square. I recognise that music is inherently part of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island culture, that this culture was stolen, and replaced with the Western music framework I have spent my career engaging with and working under.

  • I commit to deepening my insight into the cultural appropriation of music, to respect and hold space for language, kinship, knowledge, art, music, performance and storytelling sovereign to this nation and to fully exploring my use of music so that it may become a tool for cultural safety and cultural respect.

  • I acknowledge that there has been no cultural exchange on these lands, and therefore my position and platform within music therapy, allied health, education and public speaking was/is an honour and privilege.

  • I openly celebrate my own neuro-divergent culture, support Neurodiversity in all its forms, welcome BIPOC, gender and sexual diversity in this space and hold to identity and ability inclusive language.

  • I am passionate about re-membering my sovereign voice, and supporting others to do the same. Our voice is one of our greatest tools for self expression, emotional release, advocacy and empowerment, yet it has been suppressed for so long that our culture firmly believes our voice should be used for cognitive based spoken communication only. Throughout history our voices have been suppressed, silenced, limited, cancelled, mocked, questioned and ignored, and I commit to using my work as a way of dismantling the patriarchal censorship of voice, and empowering our vocal autonomy.

  • I consider neurodivergent people the experts of neurodivergence, and acknowledge that peer reviewed research is often flawed due to cultural bias, funding bias and the Western Hierarchy of Evidence (rational ways of knowing valued over embodied ways of knowing.) Therefore, my resources are informed by lived experience, scientific enquiry, academic research, expert opinion and various other formal and informal documentation.

  • I am passionate about dismantling the great musical myth of ‘being musical’. It is common in our culture to think of some people as musical and others as not. The ones we call musical are typically the ones who’s parents could afford piano lessons, who are physically able to play a western instrument, who have the self efficacy to stand in front of a crowd and sing into a microphone, who express their musically in alignment with the Western Scale (aka ‘sing in tune’). These are deeply conditioned beliefs that have led us to perpetuate the exclusivity of music and overlook the privilege in which this concept is rooted...

  • I commit to using my work as a tool for challenging the rhetoric around what music IS and what music IS NOT, to enhance the inclusivity of music experience, to shift the focus solely from music as entertainment and education and to deepen the validity of music as expression and experience.

Awards and Accolades