Faculty

Research Interests

Professor Deutsch's research investigates the way people perceive and remember musical patterns. She has discovered a number of musical illusions, including the octave illusion, the scale illusion, the glissando illusion, the tritone paradox, and the cambiata illusion, among others. One characteristic of Deutsch's illusions is that there are large variations between listeners in how they are perceived. For some of the illusions (such as the octave and scale illusions) disagreements tend to arise between righthanders and lefthanders, indicating that they reflect differences in brain organization. In contrast, differences in perception of the tritone paradox are related to the geographic region in which the listeners have grown up, and so to the language or dialect to which they have been exposed, particularly in childhood. Deutsch and her colleagues are exploring in detail the characteristics of these illusions, and the reasons why they occur.

Deutsch is also investigating perfect pitch - the ability to name a musical note (like C, or D#) when it is presented in isolation. This ability has been considered to be very rare. However, Deutsch and her colleagues have shown that speakers of tone languages (Vietnamese and Mandarin) use perfect pitch in their speech, and they are extending these findings to the question of perfect pitch in music.

Further areas of Deutsch's experimental and theoretical research include relationships between speech and music, the characteristics of short term memory for pitch and timing, the way we perceive musical patterns and store them in memory, relationships between handedness and musical ability, and the perception of ambiguous speech sounds.

Selected Publications

Musical Illusions and Paradoxes, La Jolla, Philomel Records, 1995.

The Psychology of Music (Ed.). San Diego: Academic Press (1st Edition, 1982; 2nd Edition, 1999).

Grouping mechanisms in music. In D. Deutsch (Ed.) The Psychology of Music, 2nd. Edition, Academic Press, 1999, pp. 299-348.

Processing of pitch combinations. In D. Deutsch (Ed.) The Psychology of Music, 2nd. Edition, Academic Press, 1999, pp. 349-412.

The puzzle of absolute pitch. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2002, 11, 200-204.