Staff profile

Aliya Edwards is a Music Psychology researcher, currently pursuing a cross-discipline PhD investigating voluntary musical imagery (imagining music in the mind’s ear). Her current work focuses on imagining a whole piece of music and how this might be affected by individual factors such as experience with and of music, especially working with music professionally.

Her pre-doctoral research includes studying the role of context in memory for music, the impact of musical imagery on musical memory, and music's role in the identity of third-culture individuals. She is a member of the Music Psychology Lab at Durham, was an editorial assistant of the Durham Undergraduate Research in Music and Science (DURMS) journal 2022-2024, is a member of the Center for Research into Inner Experience, and is a member of the Inner Music and Wellbeing Network. In addition, she teaches both first- and second-year undergraduate psychology modules.

Conference Presentations

Edwards, A., Easton, A., Jakubowski, K., Halpern, A. (2024, July 3-6). Musical Imagery Use by Sound Technicians & Musicians in Musical Settings [Conference presentation]. European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM) 12. University of Leeds, Leeds, United Kingdom.

Edwards, A., Easton, A., Halpern, A., Jakubowski, K. (2023, October 18-20). Music and Episodic Memory: What’s under the hood? [Conference presentation]. International Conference of Students of Systematic Musicology (SysMus) 23. University of Sheffield, Sheffield, United Kingdom.

• Musical Imagery
• Musical Memory

Journal Article

• Jakubowski, K., Ahmad, N., Armitage, J., Barrett, L., Edwards, A., Galbo, E., Gómez-Cañón, J. S., Graves, T. A., Jadzgevičiūtė, A., Kirts, C., Lahdelma, I., Lennie, T. M., Ramatally, A., Schlichting, J. L., Steliou, C., Vishwanath, K., & Eerola, T. (2025). Participant and Musical Diversity in Music Psychology Research. Music & Science, 8, 1-17. https://doi.org/10.1177/20592043251317180