Diana Deutsch on Two Perceptual Puzzles: Audio Illusions and Perfect Pitch

I'm very happy to welcome Prof. Diana Deutsch to Stanford, CCRMA and the Hearing Seminar. Diana has illustrious career at the intersection of speech and music perception. Perhaps most interestingly, how does music gets perceived as speech, and speech perceived as music? We usually think of them as different kinds of signals, perceived differently and with different uses. What do these types of signals tell us about how the auditory system is organized?

Who: Dr. Diana Deutsch (CCRMA and UCSD)
What: Two Perceptual Puzzles: Audio Illusions and Perfect Pitch
When: 10:30AM on Friday January 19, 2024
Where: CCRMA Seminar Room (Behind the elevator on the top floor)
Why: What could be more interesting than the intersection of speech and music perception?

Note, Prof. Deutsch will be appearing virtually. We hope you will join the discussion in the CCRMA Seminar room, but if you are remote you can also participate via Zoom. The link is here:
   https://stanford.zoom.us/j/95515322313?pwd=bnFUczlYZDhDVmMzeXp2azRZSm9ydz09 Password: 733840
We will do our best to continue the full discussions for which the Hearing Seminar is known.

See you at CCRMA.

- Malcolm


Two Perceptual Puzzles: Audio Illusions and Perfect Pitch
Diana Deutsch

Abstract
This talk is in three parts. The first part concerns a number of musical illusions that I discovered. These illusions show that the hearing system involves an enormous amount of unconscious inference, or top-down processing - a huge influence of experience, attention, expectation, and emotion - in determining what we hear. They also show that people can differ strikingly in the way they hear even very simple musical patterns. In some cases, these differences arise between righthanders and lefthanders, indicating that they reflect variations in brain organisation. In the case of another illusion, perceptual variations correlate with the geographic region in which listeners grew up, and so with the languages or dialects to which they were exposed, particularly in childhood.

The second part of the talk involves absolute pitch (known as 'perfect pitch') which is the ability to identify the name of a musical note just on hearing it. This ability had thought to be confined to a few rare individuals. But I'll be showing that absolute pitch is quite prevalent among speakers of tone languages such as Mandarin, Cantonese, and Vietnamese, indicating a linkage between music and speech.
Finally, the speech-to-song illusion is demonstrated, and its implications are discussed.


Diana Deutsch is Adjunct Professor at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics in the Music Department at Stanford University, and Emeritus Professor in the Psychology Department at the University of California, San Diego. Her publications include 'Musical Illusions and Phantom Words: How Music and Speech Unlock Mysteries of the Brain' (2019), 'The Psychology of Music,' (1st ed. 1982; 2nd ed. 1999; 3rd ed. 2013); and the compact discs 'Musical Illusions and Paradoxes' (1995) and 'Phantom Words and Other Curiosities' (2003). She has discovered a number of musical illusions and paradoxes, and investigates absolute pitch, and memory and attention in music.

Deutsch 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; the Science Writing Award for Professionals in Acoustics from the Acoustical Society of America; and the Gold Medal Award from the Audio Engineering Society.