Deutsch's Musical Illusions
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Mysterious melody
The ‘mysterious melody’ was first described and published by Deutsch, D. in Perception and Psychophysics, 1972. This musical brain teaser shows how our knowledge of a piece of music can have a profound influence on how we hear it. Suppose you play a well-known tune such that all the note names (C, D, E, and so on) are correct, but the tones are distributed haphazardly among three different octaves. If people are given no clues as to what the tune might be, they find it very difficult to identify. But once they know what to listen for, the melody becomes easy to follow. The ‘mysterious melody’ provides a striking example of ‘top-down processing’ or the use of prior expectations, in sound perception.
References:
Deutsch, D. Octave generalization and tune recognition. Perception and Psychophysics,1972, 11, 411-412. [PDF Document]
Deutsch, D. Octave equivalence and the processing of melodic sequences. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 1976, 60 , s94.
Deutsch, D. Octave generalization and melody identification. Perception and Psychophysics, 1978, 23, 91-92.
Deutsch, D. Octave generalization and the consolidation of melodic information. Canadian Journal of Psychology, 1979, 33, 201-205.
Deutsch, D. and Boulanger, R. C. Octave equivalence and the processing of tonal sequences. Music Perception, 1984, 2, 40-51.
Deutsch, D. Processing of pitch combinations. In D. Deutsch (Ed.) The psychology of music, 2nd Edition, Academic Press, 1999, 349-412. [PDF Document]
