Diana Deutsch's Audio Illusions : About the Author

Diana Deutsch is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego, and conducts research on perception and memory for sounds, particularly music. She has discovered a number of musical illusions and paradoxes, which include the octave illusion, the scale illusion, the glissando illusion, the tritone paradox, the cambiata illusion, the phantom words illusion and the speech-to-song illusion, among others. She also explores ways in which we hold musical information in memory, and in which we relate the sounds of music and speech to each other. Much of her current research focuses on the question of absolute pitch - why some people possess it, and why it is so rare. (See, for example, recent work comparing the prevalence of absolute pitch in speakers of tone language and non-tone language).

Deutsch obtained a First Class Honors B.A. in Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology from Oxford University, and a Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of California, San Diego. She has over 150 written publications, including books, book chapters, and articles. She is Editor of the book The Psychology of Music, Academic Press, 1982, 2nd Edition 1999, (see review), 3rd Edition 2013, (see review), and author of the compact discs Musical Illusions and Paradoxes (1995) and Phantom Words and Other Curiosities (2003) see review of both CDs.

Deutsch has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Acoustical Society of America, the Audio Engineering Society, the Society of Experimental Psychologists, the American Psychological Society, and the American Psychological Association. She has served as Governor of the Audio Engineering Society, as Chair of the Section on Psychology of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as President of Division 10 of the American Psychological Association (Society for the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts), and as Chair of the Society of Experimental Psychologists. She is Founding Editor of the journal Music Perception, and served as Founding President of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition. She was awarded the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Achievement in Psychology and the Arts by the American Psychological Association in 2004, the Gustav Theodor Fechner Award for Outstanding Contributions to Empirical Aesthetics by the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics in 2008, and the Science Writing Award for Professionals in Acoustics by the Acoustical Society of America in 2011.

About the Author

Some media descriptions of research by Deutsch and colleagues

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Quotes about the CDs