Deutsch, Diana
Deutsch, Diana
Deutsch, Diana, significant English-born American music psychologist; b. London, Feb. 15, 1938. She studied theory and composition in London; received first-class honors B.A. in psychology from Oxford (1959) and a Ph.D. in psychology from the Univ. of Calif, at San Diego (1970), where she became a research psychologist at its Center for Human Information Processing. In 1989 she obtained professorial status there. She conducted highly creative research in psychoacoustics and the psychology of music. Her work has included extensive study of auditory illusions and paradoxes; she also created a model of the process of analyzing musical shape that received widespread attention. She ed. The Psychology of Music (N.Y., 1982), and in 1983 founded the journal Music Perception, of which she served as ed. Among her important articles are “An Auditory Illusion/’ Nature, 1251 (1974), “Internal Representation of Pitch Sequences in Tonal Music,” Psychological Review, Ixxxviii (1981), and “Pitch Class and Perceived Height: Some Paradoxes and Their Implications,” Explorations in Music, the Arts and Ideas, ed. by Narmour and Solie (N.Y., 1988).
—Nicolas Slonimsky/Laura Kuhn/Dennis McIntire