Allison Davies (she/her) creates online resources and delivers seminars and workshops around the use of music as a regulatory tool within a trauma informed and neuro-affirming framework.
Alli speaks internationally on neuro-affirming practice, embodying autistic culture and understanding neurodivergence, in particular Autism and ADHD.

Alli hosts retreats founded on the therapeutic use of music and voice, as a way of experiencing felt-safety, deepening relationship to self, moving emotions and exploring our inherent and authentic musicality.
Alli is the founder of ‘A Gathering of Voices™’, a global, online community who come together each week to sing melodic mantras and to practice using music as a form of braincare.
Alli offers private consultations, supervision and neuro-affirming parenting therapy.

Who is Allison?

Education and Professional Career

Allison Davies creates online resources for parents, educators and support staff and works with schools to deliver professional development around both the topics of neurodivergence and the use of music as a regulatory tool. She is an independent liberatory scholar currently exploring the gatekeeping and classism of the social construct ‘musical vs non musical’.

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.

Alli is an AuDHD’er with a PDA profile. She works within a neuro-affirming framework that favours deep acceptance and actualisation over intervention and assimilation, and shares her lived experience of autism openly within her seminars, workshops and conferences as part of her ‘emotive storytelling mixed with science’ approach to education.

In 2016 Alli was named a ‘National AMP Tomorrow Maker’ for her contribution to supporting Australian families through her online course, Brains = Behaviours which has been over utilised be over 2000 families. In 2018 she founded A Gathering of Voices, an online membership for adults aiming to self-regulate through therapeutic based music experiences.

In 2024 Alli was awarded the Telstra Best of Business Award for Lutruwita/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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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.