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, and the cambiata 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 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), 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, and the Gustav Theodor Fechner Award for Outstanding Contributions to Empirical Aesthetics by the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics in 2008.

For more information, including a list of publications including posted PDF files, visit Diana Deutsch's web page in the UCSD Psychology Department.

Some media descriptions of research by Deutsch and colleagues:

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