Diana German

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Diana Deutsch (* 1938 in London ) is an English psychologist who has made a name for herself through her contributions to music psychology .

She explores u. a. the perception and memory of sounds, especially music, perfect pitch , especially in speakers of tonal languages, and how we communicate with others when we talk about music.

She became known through publications on acoustic illusions and paradoxes.

Life

Studied German at Oxford , where she graduated with a BA in Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology. She earned her doctorate in psychology from the University of California, San Diego , California, where she now works as a professor. In 2004 she received the " Rudolf Arnheim Award" from the American Psychological Association for outstanding achievements. She was married to J. Anthony Deutsch (1927-2016), with whom she wrote the textbook Physiological Psychology (1966) and several specialist articles. In 1986 she was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science .

Acoustic illusions

The deceptions discovered and researched by Deutsch include:

In the following figures, red = right ear, blue = left ear.

Octave illusion

Octave illusion: stimulus

The test person is presented with two different tones alternately in each ear via headphones. Their distance is an octave. Example: The right ear listens alternately g and g ' , the left ear at the same time alternately g' and g . Almost no one can hear it properly, instead various illusions appear. The most common perception is: right ear g ' , then left ear g , then right ear g' again , then left ear g , etc.

Octave illusion: perception

This illusion persists even if the headphones are turned around and the tones presented are now interchanged. With right-handers this illusion is much more stable; with left-handers, the pattern is more often reversed, e.g. B. right ear g , then left ear g ' , then right ear g again , then left ear g' etc.

Scale illusion

The test person is presented with a different melody through headphones in each ear.

Scale illusion: stimulus

This pattern is created by playing two scales at the same time, one in ascending order, here e.g. B. from c to c ' , the other descending, here from c' to c , but each time left and right channel swapped.

Most of the test persons now perceive two completely different melodies, namely a scale from c ' down to g and back to c' in one ear, the scale from c up to f and back to c again in the other ear .

Scale Illusion: Perception

This effect is also known as "melodic channeling", since apparently chaotic tones are combined to form two ordered melodies. Right-handers usually hear the high melody on the right and the low melody on the left; Left-handed people vary more.

A variant of the scale illusion is the "chromatic illusion", in which a chromatic scale is used instead of a whole tone scale.

Glissando illusion

Two signals are played simultaneously via two stereo loudspeakers: on one channel a synthetic oboe tone (262 Hz), on the other a sinus tone glissando that rises and falls ± 1 octave (between 131 and 523 Hz) (whichever way a siren sounds). These signals are exchanged between the speakers every 0.2 seconds, so that you can always hear the oboe tone on one side and a section of the glissando on the other. However, something else is perceived: while the oboe tone is correctly heard as jumping back and forth, the glissando is put back together in the head and experienced as continuously moving back and forth between the loudspeakers, often also as ascending and descending in the room. The most common listening experience is that the ascending glissando part is heard wandering from left to right and bottom to top, the descending part from right to left and top to bottom. This finding is more stable in right-handers than in left-handers.

Cambiata illusion

A different melody is presented for each channel via stereo speakers or headphones.

Cambiata illusion: stimulus

However, the following illusion is usually heard: on one ear one hears a repeating pattern of three alternating notes in the upper register, and on the other ear one hears such a pattern in the lower register. Right-handers hear the high notes on the right and the low notes on the left:

Cambiata Illusion: Perception

CDs

  • Musical Illusions and Paradoxes (1995)
  • Phantom Words and Other Curiosities (2003)

Fonts

  • The psychology of music (Ed.), 2nd Edition, San Diego, Academic Press, 1999
  • Music recognition. Psychological Review, 1969, 76, 300-309.
  • Tones and numbers: Specificity of interference in immediate memory. Science 1970, 168, 1604-1605.
  • Mapping of interactions in the pitch memory store. Science 1972, 175, 1020-1022
  • An auditory illusion. Nature 1974, 251, 307-309
  • The organization of short term memory for a single acoustic attribute. In D. Deutsch and JA Deutsch (eds.), Short Term Memory New York: Academic Press, 1975, 107–151.
  • Two-channel listening to musical scales. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America 1975, 57, 1156-1160
  • Musical illusions. Scientific American 1975, 233, 92-104.
  • The internal representation of pitch sequences in tonal music. Psychological Review 1981, 88, 503-522 (with J. Feroe)
  • Some new sound paradoxes and their implications. In Auditory Processing of Complex Sounds; Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society Series B, 1992, 336, 391-397
  • Paradoxes of musical pitch. Scientific American 1992, 267, 88-95.
  • The puzzle of absolute pitch. Current Directions in Psychological Science 2002, 11, 200-204
  • Attention: Some theoretical considerations. Psychological Review 1963, 70, 80–90 (with JA German).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ J. Anthony Deutsch - In Memoriam. UC San Diego, accessed February 28, 2017 .
  2. ^ Fellows of the AAAS: Diana Deutsch. American Association for the Advancement of Science, accessed March 11, 2018 .
  3. ↑ Original paper (PDF; 177 kB)
  4. ↑ Original paper (PDF; 174 kB)
  5. ^ Original work ( Memento from April 4, 2007 in the Internet Archive ).
personal data
SURNAME German, Diana
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English psychologist
DATE OF BIRTH 1938
PLACE OF BIRTH London