Impressive career hit all the right notes

Professor Emerita Dr. Lola Cuddy has earned the Lifetime Career Award from Neuromusic VIII. The award was created by the Mariani Foundation, an organization which is a point of reference for the global scientific community both with regard to projects that link neuroscience and music, and in the context of dialogue between scientists and musicians, especially that aimed at promoting harmonious growth and enhancing development.

Introduced as a pioneer of music cognition research, Dr. Cuddy was among the few researchers that did experimental work on music cognition as early as the 1960s.

Calling the award a highlight of her career, Dr. Cuddy explains the research work she has dedicated her life to.

“Dating back to ancient Greece, scholars and thinkers have studied the physical properties of sound and the mathematics of vibrating bodies, which later led to the acoustics of musical instruments and the design of concert spaces,” Dr. Cuddy (Psychology) says. “What was missing was a focus on music and the brain. Questions arose: how were the melodies and harmonies of music mentally represented so as to influence musical cognition, perception, feelings, and emotion? How are these representations affected by age, and by disability? Addressing these questions has occupied much of my scholarly career, most recently with a focus on the preservation of musical memory in Alzheimer disease. My first article on this topic (2005), written with Professor Emerita Dr. Jacalyn Duffin, was awarded the Horrobin Prize for innovation in research.”

Dr. Cuddy says starting out in this research direction carried its own difficulties and required a lot of moral and intellectual support. She reflects on the support she’s received over the years.

“My late husband, Mel Wiebe, took an active and constant interest in my research while forwarding his own scholarly career,” she says. “Family, early mentors, my colleagues, and technical support at Queen’s and my many international colleagues are too numerous to mention by name. I will always remember them individually with gratitude. Of foremost importance, my former graduate students and post-doctoral fellows have been invaluable, enthusiastic, and tireless contributors to progress in this developing field. Many have remained in contact to this day.

“I also want to thank Maria Majno and Isabelle Peretz of the Mariani Foundation for their role in initiating this award and for their dedicated efforts to implement its presentation.”

And, though Dr. Cuddy is long retired, she is thinking about yet another new research direction. “I’ve taken a recent interest in musical embodiment, which is the role of movement and gesture in musical cognition and emotion. We may understand musical experience through the structure of our bodies and their interactions with our environment.”