In Australia, approximately 20 children each year are diagnosed with Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG), an aggressive form of brain cancer (Children’s Cancer Institute, 2025). DIPG generally occurs in children under 12, with no curative treatment options, and a median survival rate of 9–11 months after diagnosis (RUN DIPG, 2025). ORGANISATION delivers home-based music therapy sessions to children with a brain cancer diagnosis, including those in the palliative stage of treatment.

This presentation offers a case study of music therapy with T, a nine-year-old girl on a mission to find a cure for DIPG and unite the world through love, empathy, and creativity. Music therapy sessions were provided by an ORGANISATION registered music therapist in T’s home during the last two weeks of her life, and incorporated extended-family musical improvisations, collaborative songwriting, and listening to self-selected music. An original album of T’s songs was also created with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI).

The process of curating and producing this album will be outlined, demonstrating how AI was employed to enhance and complete song lyrics and/or written fragments, and how its use was guided by ethical and therapeutic considerations. Accompanied by audiovisual examples, the presenter will also explore how music therapy supported family collaborations in creating a legacy project (Cahalan et al., 2022). This will also be contextualised within emerging research into the role of AI in music therapy practice (Sun et al., 2024).

Finally, the presenter will reflect on the impact of the album for T, her family, friends, and the wider community. Key considerations for the integration of AI into end-of-life therapeutic contexts will also be highlighted, along with a discussion of the opportunities, challenges, and future directions of AI as a therapeutic tool in music therapy clinical practice.