The Psychology of Music

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. 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.

1: The Perception of Musical Tones 2: Musical Timbre Perception 3: Perception of Singing 4: Intervals and Scales 5: Absolute Pitch 6: Grouping Mechanisms in Music 7: The Processing of Pitch Combinations 8: Computational Models of Music Cognition 9: Structure and Interpretation of Rhythm in Music 10: Music Performance: Movement and Coordination 11: Musical Development 12: Music and Cognitive Abilities 13: The Biological Foundations of Music: Insights from Congenital Amusia 14: Brain Plasticity Induced by Musical Training 15: Music and Emotion 16: Comparative Music Cognition: Cross-species and Cross-Cultural Studies 17: Psychologists and Musicians: Then and Now