Ingrid Pieterse Graduates in Music Therapy Despite Vision Loss

Her vision has faded, but her dream and sense of purpose never did. Pretoria, South Africa (01 June 2026) – Ingrid Pieterse has wanted to be a music therapist... The post Ingrid Pieterse Graduates in Music Therapy Despite Vision Loss appeared first on Good Things Guy.

Jun 1, 2026 - 16:15 Updated: Jun 1, 2026 - 16:17

Ingrid Pieterse Graduates in Music Therapy Despite Vision Loss

Her vision has faded, but her dream and sense of purpose never did.

Pretoria, South Africa (01 June 2026) – Ingrid Pieterse has wanted to be a music therapist for twenty years, and she did not for a second let her disability stop her. Pieterse lives with Stargardt disease, a condition that causes progressive vision loss.

Her story starts in the late 1990s. After matriculating, she completed a bachelor’s degree in Music at the University of Pretoria and hoped to keep going. But life, as it so often does, shaped up differently. She got married, moved away from Pretoria, and found herself building a life far from the academic path in music that she had imagined for herself.

She studied part-time through UNISA – working through psychology modules and gaining a certificate in education – and spent years volunteering wherever she could find meaningful work with people. The dream of music therapy never left her; it idly waited.

“I opened a savings account to start preparing financially for my music therapy studies that I still dreamed I would tackle in the future,” she says.

She didn’t know when, and she didn’t know exactly how, but she believed that the day would come.

Two decades later, she discovered she could study music therapy remotely. She threw herself into it and began reading voraciously through an online library for the visually impaired and taught herself to play the guitar from scratch!

“The moment I started reading these books, I became excited once more about the profession and the wonderful work in which I would be trained,” she says.

Later that year, she travelled to Pretoria for her audition.

“This was a very nerve-racking experience because I’d been aiming for this dream for so long that I wasn’t quite sure what I’d do if I wasn’t accepted,” she says.“I was delighted when I received the news that I would be beginning my studies at UP in February 2024.”

And so, after twenty years, Ingrid Pieterse walked back through the doors of the University of Pretoria and began the studies she had spent her life working toward.

Attending university with progressive vision loss came with many challenges. Ingrid had to navigate unfamiliar spaces independently, recognise people by their voices before she could place their faces, and find her way through new environments with her cane, while carrying instruments to clinical wards.

“The thought of having to map out new spaces and interact with people who I would only be able to recognise once I’d become familiar with their voices was terrifying,” she says.

She adapted to it all with grace. To manage her coursework, she used screen readers, text-to-speech applications, and a remarkable device called MyEye, which converts printed text into audio. For presentations, she memorised entire PowerPoint slideshows from beginning to end without ever seeing the slides, pacing herself through each one entirely from memory.

“I try to find alternatives when faced with difficult circumstances rather than giving up when the going gets tough,” she adds.

In her clinical work, Ingrid has built an entirely different way of connecting with her clients. She relies on sound, touch and verbal interaction to form therapeutic connections, tuning into the emotional texture of a client’s voice as a window into how they were truly feeling.

“A lot can be gleaned from the intonation of a person’s voice as they respond in the moment, even beyond any words spoken,” she says.

With elderly clients, gentle physical contact became both a source of comfort and an important source of feedback, telling her things about their engagement and emotional state that others might have read visually. In group settings, she has developed careful strategies to track every participant by their voice, their position in the room, and the instrument they play.

In her research, Pieterse focused on how music therapy can help adults navigate the emotional aftermath of acquiring a physical disability, exploring how clinical improvisation and songwriting can help people rediscover a sense of agency and identity when everything they knew about themselves has changed.

“Having a disability has led me to be a very determined person, as I’ve always wanted to prove to myself, and I suppose to others as well, that nothing can stand in my way.”