DIANA DEUTSCH is a professor of psychology at the University of California, San Diego. She is internationally known for the musical illusions and paradoxes that she discovered: octave illusion, the scale illusion, the glissando illusion, the tritone paradox, the cambiata illusion, the phantom words illusion and the speech-to-song illusion, among others. She also explores memory for music, and how we relate the sounds of music and speech to each other. In addition, she studies absolute pitch—why some people possess it, and why it is so rare.
She 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 received the Rudolf Arnheim Award for Outstanding Achievement in Psychology and the Arts from the American Psychological Association, the Gustav Theodor Fechner Award for Outstanding Contributions to Empirical Aesthetics from the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics, and the Science Writing Award for Professionals in Acoustics from the Acoustical Society of America.
She is the author of The Psychology of Music and Musical Illusions and Phantom Words.
