Dr Vicky Abad

Music Beat Australia is the brainchild of Dr Vicky Abad.

Dr Vicky founded Music Beat Australia as Boppin’ Babies in 2007 when her daughter was just four months old so that she could attend music with her father. So she created music groups where children are immersed in a beautiful, high quality, live musical environment that are tailored to their development needs.

As the range of services the business offered grew Vicky realised there was much more to what we offered than baby groups, and in 2018 rebranded under the new business name of Music Beat Australia. You can read more about our history here.

Dr Vicky is a Registered Music Therapist with extensive national and international clinical experience in paediatric and early intervention music therapy and music early learning. She holds a an Undergraduate Degree in Music, Post Graduate Degree in Music Therapy, Master’s Degree in Early Childhood Research and a PhD in music early learning and music therapy. You can read Dr Vicky’s PhD thesis online at the The University of Queensland UQ eSpace online library.

She is a researcher at the University of Queensland where she researches music early learning and the impact of this on family well-being.

She has achieved international recognition for her clinical work and research in the area of music therapy parent-child intervention and the impact of music early learning on family health and well-being.

The latest research findings that she and her colleagues reported (Dr Kate Williams, Professor Barrett, Professor Welch, and Dr Broughton) showed that early shared music in the home led to significant improvements in vocabulary, numeracy, social and emotional skills.

She has been the Program Director of the Master in Music Therapy Course at the University of Queensland, Brisbane, and the Director M.A. of Music Therapy at the University of Limerick’s Irish World Music Centre in the Republic of Ireland. Her other roles include Senior Music Therapist at the Royal Children’s Hospital in Brisbane, and the Founding Director of the internationally renowned music therapy early intervention program Sing & Grow.

Dr Vicky has published widely and has presented and keynoted in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, Norway, Austria and the United Kingdom. Her book The Economic of Therapy which she edited with colleague Dan Thomas was published in April 2017.

Dr Vicky is currently the President of the Australian Music Therapy Association.

Dr Vicky feels extremely blessed to be a mother, and is happy to share her ideas on using music in parenting and in the home based on personal as well as