Diana Deutsch

Diana Deutsch (born 15 February 1938) is a British-American psychologist from London, England.

She is a professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego, and is a prominent researcher on the psychology of music.

Deutsch is primarily known for her discoveries in music and speech illusions.

She also studies the cognitive foundation of musical grammars, which consists of the way people hold musical pitches in memory, and how people relate The Sounds of music and speech to each other.

In addition, she is known for her work on absolute pitch (perfect pitch), which she has shown is far more prevalent among speakers of tonal languages.

Diana Deutsch was born Diana Sokol, on 15 February 1938, in London, England, to Max and Iska Sokol.

Her father was a sculptor of the expressionist school, and she attributes her strong interest in relationships between art, science and philosophy to her many conversations with him in childhood.

Deutsch was educated at Christ's Hospital in Hertford.

She entered St Anne's College, Oxford in 1956, and obtained a First Class Honors degree in psychology, Philosophy, and Physiology in 1959.

When at Oxford, she was particularly influenced by debates concerning the philosophy of mind, and relationships between reality and illusion.

In 1957, while an undergraduate at Oxford, she met and married J. Anthony Deutsch, a lecturer there, and they moved to the U.S. in 1959.

Together they wrote the textbook Physiological Psychology (1st edition 1966; 2nd edition 1973), edited the book Short Term Memory (1975) and wrote several articles, including Attention: Some Theoretical Considerations (1963), which was cited as a Current Contents Citation Classic in 1981.

Deutsch received her Ph.D. in psychology in 1970 from the University of California, San Diego, was appointed Research Scientist in 1971, and Professor of Psychology in 1989, both at the University of California, San Diego.

Deutsch discovered a number of illusions of music and speech related to sound perception and memory.

They show that there are remarkable variations in how people perceive music.

Some of these variations relate to differences in brain organization, and others relate to the listeners' languages and dialects.

The illusions also demonstrate the importance of memory, knowledge and expectations to how we perceive music and speech, and point to strong connections between the brain systems responsible for these two forms of communication.

One set of illusions occur when two sequences of tones are presented over stereo headphones, such that when the right ear receives one sequence the left ear receives a different sequence.

Using this procedure, Deutsch discovered striking illusions, as well as the Octave illusion, the scale illusion, the chromatic illusion, the glissando illusion, and the cambiata illusion.

She discovered that there are strong disagreements between listeners and how these illusions were perceived.

These disagreements tend to occur between righthanders and lefthanders indicating that they reflect differences in brain organization.

These illusions have implications for musical practice.

For example, listening to music in concert halls may allow the audience to experience the same musical patterns in different ways.

The illusions also demonstrate the existence of illusory conjunctions in hearing.

Deutsch also produced illusions using sequences of tones that were defined in terms of pitch class (note name), but ambiguous in terms of which Octave they are in (known as Shepard tones).

In particular, she discovered the tritone paradox.

Once again, this illusion gave the perception that differs substantially from one listener to another, but in this case, perceptual variations relate to the language or dialect spoken by the listener, indicating a relationship between music and speech.

In addition, Deutsch discovered the Speech-to-Song Illusion.

In this illusion, speech is made to be heard as a song, and this occurs without transforming The Sounds in any way.

Through simply repeating a phrase several times over, this illusion also points to a strong relationship between speech and music.

Two further illusions discovered by Deutsch also show the importance of unconscious inference – our use of memory, beliefs and expectations – in perception of music and speech.

One is called the mysterious melody illusion.

Listeners are unable to identify a well-known melody when all its note names are correct, but the tones are placed randomly in different octaves.

However, when listeners are told the identity of the melody, they are able to recognize it through stored knowledge.

Another is the phantom words illusion.

Using stereo loudspeakers, Deutsch presented repeating words and phrases that were composed of two syllables.

The syllables alternated between the speakers in which one syllable came from the speaker on the right while the other syllable came from the speaker on the left.

When listening to such sequences, listeners 'heard' words and phrases that had not been presented; often these 'phantom words' were related to their memories and expectations.

Deutsch's research also focuses on absolute pitch (or perfect pitch), which is the ability to name or produce a musical note without the aid of a reference note.

Deutsch is the author of Musical Illusions and Phantom Words: How Music and Speech Unlock Mysteries of the Brain (2019), the editor for Psychology of Music, and also the compact discs Musical Illusions and Paradoxes (1995) and Phantom Words and Other Curiosities (2003).