I am delighted to announce Professor Isabelle Peretz, University of Montreal, as the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award of the SMPC. Isabelle has produced pioneering research that has fundamentally changed our understanding of how the human brain analyzes and understands music. Dr. Peretz's remarkable career spans the perceptual functions of music recognition, emotional response, musical skill acquisition, and auditory memory.

The scope of Dr. Peretz’s findings is truly incredible. Isabelle was the first to argue with scientific rigour that the brain has specialized cortical networks for perceiving music. Another first is her finding of a genetic basis for amusia: a disorder of understanding  musical sound. Isabelle has tackled several long-standing problems including beat deafness or cases of individuals who cannot process the rhythm of music, and most recently, the genetic foundations and developmental time course of musical prodigies. 

The enduring contributions of Isabelle’s vision to the nation’s intellectual and cultural life are directly evidenced in the fact that the phrase “music neuroscience” was not in parlance prior to Isabelle’s ground-breaking Annual Review of Psychology paper that launched the field. In sum, Isabelle Peretz is an extraordinary scholar whose impact is far-reaching; her outstanding research career has transformed the way we think about musical ability; and Isabelle is an invaluable asset to any team that approaches complex questions of human nature. We congratulate Dr. Isabelle Peretz on her Lifetime Achievement Award from the SMPC.

• As read by Caroline Palmer at the 2022 SMPC Meeting