Diana Deutsch

Professor Diana Deutsch is one of the most prominent researchers on the psychology of music. She is internationally known for the illusions of sound and music perception that she has discovered. 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 over 200 publications, which include the book The Psychology of Music, now in its third edition, and three articles in Scientific American. She has also published two compact discs that feature her illusions: these are Musical Illusions and Paradoxes, and Phantom Words, and Other Curiosities.

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, and as Chair of the Society of Experimental Psychologists. She served as the Founding Editor of the journal Music Perception, and as the Founding President of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition. Among her many awards, Deutsch has received the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Achievement in Psychology and the Arts by the American Psychological Association, the Gustav Theodore Fechner Award by the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, the Science Writing Award for Professionals in Acoustics from the Acoustical Society of America, and the Gold Medal Award from the Audio Engineering Society for “lifelong contributions to the understanding of the human hearing mechanism and the science of psychoacoustics.” 

Deutsch’s new book: ‘Musical Illusions and Phantom Words: How Music and Speech
Unlock Mysteries of the Brain’, is due to be published by Oxford University Press in June,
2019.

Updated April 2019

• Musical Illusions and Phantom Words: How Music and Speech Unlock Mysteries of the Brain. Oxford University Press, in press (publication date June 2019).
• Deutsch, D. The Psychology of Music, 3rd Edition, 2013, Elsevier
• Deutsch, D. (Ed.). Absolute pitch. In D. Deutsch (Ed.) The psychology of music, 3nd Edition, 2013, Elsevier, pp. 141-182.
• Deutsch, D. (Ed.). Grouping mechanisms in music . In D. Deutsch (Ed.) The psychology of music, 3nd Edition, 2013, Elsevier, pp. 183-248.
• Deutsch, D. (Ed.). The processing of pitch combinations . In D. Deutsch (Ed.) The psychology of music, 3nd Edition, 2013, Elsevier, pp. 249-325.
• Deutsch, D., Henthorn, T., and Lapidis, R. Illusory transformation from speech to song.     Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2011, 129, 2245-2252
• Deutsch, D. Speaking in tones. Scientific American Mind, 2010, July/August 36-43.
• Deutsch, D., Dooley, K., Henthorn, T. and Head, B. Absolute pitch among students in an American music conservatory: Association with tone language fluency. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 2009, 125, 2398-2403.

Update April 2019