During school holidays, teenagers usually spend it hanging out with their friends or staying at home.

This 13-year-old did something different.

Hannah Burnett is a harpist, who only started playing this string instrument 18 months before. Now, she’s been playing twice a week at the Special Care Nursery at the Maternity Ward of the Cairns Hospital.

She plays her own compositions to premature or sick newborn babies.

“You don’t really want the Highland jig for the babies because that might make them cry,” Hannah explained.

This isn’t the first time that Hannah has played the harp at the hospital.

During Christmas, she played at the hospital several times and loved the experience.

She asked her parents if she could play again and they eventually gave in to her request. They approached the Cairns Hospital management about the possibility of Hannah playing the harp.

It took a few months before the hospital called them again. And this time, it was to ask Hannah to play an hour of harp music two times a week at the special care nursery during the school holidays.

Hannah was ecstatic!

“To have something so soft and gentle and calming as a harp playing, drifting down the corridor is absolutely beautiful,” Jonelle Mayers of the Special Baby Care Unit at Cairns Hospital said.

Sounds have always had both a positive and negative effect on other people, depending on the type of sound heard. Hospitals are no exception.

Patients, nurses, doctors, and hospital staff spent most of their waking hours inside the hospital. While at the hospital, they hear mostly machines beeping, the sound of nurses running to the rooms, and conversations between the workers or visitors.

According to FOX News, these mechanical and interruptive sounds can wake people up, keep people from resting, and slow down patient’s recovery.

Using the right sounds with the right music can definitely make a difference.

“Music perception was demonstrated to bring about positive change in patient-reported outcomes such as eliciting positive emotion and decreasing the levels of stressful conditions… It… possesses a soothing quality that induces positive feelings in patients… Soundscape, rather than merely noise, can permit a subtler… sound and music in the hospital setting, thereby creating a means for improving the hospital experience for patients and nurses,” Timothy Onosahwo Iyendo concluded in his study.

And the people in the hospital had really enjoyed Hannah’s first time playing at the hospital.

It made a lot of sense to ask her to come back again to play.

“There’s so much documented evidence to support how music therapy helps people in hospitals and it improves outcomes,” Jonelle added.

Unfortunately, there are no licensed musical therapists in Cairns.

But there are enthusiastic students who are also musicians living locally who can definitely help. And they seized the opportunity when they found Hannah.

“I always knew that I wanted to help people. No one really wants to be in the hospital with all the noise, and the beeping, and the crying,” Hannah told 7News Brisbane. “I just really wanted to come and help the children here, [who] may or may not grow up, which is a really hard thing to accept. It just seemed like a beautiful place for a harp to play.”

And what makes it even more special is that Hannah was born in the same hospital and spent time in the same nursery.

“It makes it extra special to have Hannah back, now playing her harp for other families and babies,” Jonelle mentioned.

Would you like to be soothed and comforted by Hannah’s music? Watch the video below.

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Source: 7News Brisbane, Science Direct, FOX News, ABC Far North