Annie O'Neill, Post-Gazette Music therapist Debbie Benkovitz soothes 13-month-old Ryne DeArmitt with some Bach during a recent visit to the intermediate intensive care unit at Children's Hospital. Click top photo for larger image. View an audio slideshow on "The Music Lady" by clicking the image below.

The child is surrounded by balloons, toys and stuffed animals from home, but she is lying in a bed that is not hers, attached to a web of wires, tubes and hoses. Even though her mother sits smiling nearby, she is in a scary world filled with the sound of beeping monitors and whispering strangers.

And then there is music.

It might be Bach or it might be "Baby Beluga in the Deep Blue Sea." Either way, it means that Debbie Benkovitz, music therapist at Children's Hospital of Pittsburgh, is making her rounds.

Depending on the child and the situation, she uses music to perk them up or calm them down. She figures out the mood of the patient, plays music to match it, then moves the music in the direction that the hospital staff wants the child to go.

"It's absolutely amazing," said Autumn Lord, 23, a registered nurse at Children's Hospital for two years. "I think it's just like medicine. She's basically one of our medicines for getting kids to calm down. She's wonderful."

Ms. Benkovitz enters the room -- whether it's a private space or the hospital's larger Neonatal Intensive Care Unit -- with a guitar slung over her shoulder, pushing a cart with a keyboard and all sorts of smaller instruments. There are rattles and shakers and drums. And her cheerful greeting, which is a song in itself.

"I have a lot of experience with children," said Ms. Benkovitz, 54, a licensed social worker who is a trained music education teacher with a voice major and a piano minor. She studied music therapy at Duquesne University and began working at Children's Hospital in Oakland almost three years ago.

"I've been teaching them, I've been working with them, I have kids of my own. Kids consider me more like a grandma-type, which just horrifies me," she said with a laugh. "But [it gives me] a different relationship with the kids. I can't help it."

It's a gift, one that she is more than willing to share with others. She has two interns who work with her at Children's. And one of the speakers addressing the 500-plus people attending the American Music Therapy Association's Mid-Atlantic Conference this weekend in Pittsburgh. The three-day event will feature topics such as decreasing anxiety in young patients, stimulating their senses and even empowering them. All through the use of music.

There is no shortage of evidence that it works, whether it's a mother's instinct to hum as she rocks her crying baby or a recent study at the University of Rochester Medical Center in New York that suggests young bone marrow transplant patients who receive music therapy begin producing white blood cells two days faster than patients in a control group.

And yet Ms. Benkovitz is rare.

"As far as music therapists working exclusively in pediatric hospitals, my guess is that there are just two or three dozen of us at the most right now," she said.

Part of the reason for that, she said, might be that people aren't familiar with what music therapists do.

"Parents sometimes see me come into the room with a guitar on my back and they think I'm going to come in and entertain," she said. "But then when they see the wide array of things that we can do and they see how engaging it is for their child, they're often surprised."

Ryne DeArmitt, who just turned 1, is being treated for brain damage he suffered two months ago when the car carrying him and his mother, Amanda Edwards, flipped on an icy road and came to rest in water. Ms. Edwards, 20, of Altoona, said the nurses have had a hard time keeping the child still.

"Yesterday, the first time [Ms. Benkovitz played for him], I saw a [significant] reaction," she said. "He went from being really fidgety to real calm and relaxed. He's usually pretty hard to calm down."

Ms. Edwards prefers that her child hear classical music. On the other hand, for 6-year-old Willem Jager of Shaker Heights, Ohio, who had a heart and double-lung transplant in November 2004, something more upbeat and modern is in order. Ms. Benkovitz even lets Willem tap out a tune of his own making on her electronic keyboard.

And then there is Briahna Plotts, 3, who is being treated for cancer. Ms. Benkovitz loves her "A Bushel and a Peck." She gets a kiss and a hug around the neck.

"I've kind of created a monster, because now I can't handle everything that comes my way," said Ms. Benkovitz, who sees about 10 children a day. "But that's a nice thing. I have to figure out who to see, who needs it most, who can benefit from it most each day."

Very often, especially with the older kids, Ms. Benkovitz will let the children take charge of the music.

She plays a snippet from a song she recorded about Aidan -- "a boy who liked apple juice" -- and recounts the joy that went into singing it with him.

Aidan, who was 2, died of liver cancer three weeks ago.

The rest of the story she tells is marked by long pauses and words spoken quickly in order to keep swelling emotions at bay.

"It was a tough couple of weeks for me," she said. "You do get close to the kids."

And the parents.

"I'm always aware of the family," she said. "Sometimes the family needs therapy more than the child. Especially when you get families with new diagnoses that are pretty devastating -- 'Your child has cancer' or 'Your child is going to need a transplant.'"

She says she knows that what she does is appreciated. Even a grumpy child who one day doesn't want to cooperate asks her mother the next day, "When is the music lady coming?"