It is an incredible honor to present to Caroline Palmer the SMPC lifetime achievement award. She is incredibly deserving of this recognition, and to be considered among the other amazing researchers in this group.

This award is also personal for me, as like many other people I owe my career in music cognition, and with it a good share of the happiness I have enjoyed in life to Caroline, who encouraged me to pursue a PhD with her in Ohio state in the mid 90’s. Caroline was a major part of the incredible community we had there, and with her energy and dedication she want on to enhance another community like it at McGill. 

For those who don’t know, Caroline’s lab is a powerhouse of activity and a fantastic incubator for ideas. That’s because she has boundless energy borne out by a passion for science and for the success of her students. It is thus not surprising that Caroline has had such a profound effect on our field by positioning music performance as a model system for understanding the role of music in our lives, including memory retrieval, interpersonal synchronization, emotional communication, and the list goes on. She has published prolifically but every single product involves incredibly painstaking attention to detail and rigor. 

I solicited comments from a sampling of the vast number of people in music cognition who could comment on her profound impact. The comments I received included observations like: 

“at a time when music performance was far from central to cognitive science, [Caroline] placed it at the heart of rigorous experimental research on memory, timing, and movement” 

‘[Caroline is] …one of the rare scholars whose work is both historically central to the field and actively pushing it into its next theoretical phase” 

“What I have always admired most about Caroline is the combination of brilliance and humanity that she brings to everything she does. She has helped shape not only the science of music cognition, but also the people who practice it .”

Not surprisingly, we are not the first to recognize Caroline’s impact. Among her recognitions Caroline received an early career award from the American Psychological Association, the tier I CRC, the Distinguished James McGill Professorate, and is a fellow the Royal Society of Canada. However, I’m hoping that our award may take a special place on her formidable award shelf.

• As read by Peter Pfordresher at the 2026 SMPC Meeting