Believing Your Ears: Examining Auditory Illusions - A Conversation with Diana Deutsch

A Conversation with Diana Deutsch

Howard Burton

• Publisher: Ideas Roadshow
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781771700382
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Neuroscienza e neuropsicologia cognitiva

This book is based on an extensive filmed conversation between Howard Burton and Diana Deutsch, Professor of Psychology at UC San Diego and one of the world's leading experts on the psychology of music. This conversation provides behind the scenes insights into her discovery of a large number of auditory illusions, including the so-called Octave Illusion, which concretely illustrate how what we think we're hearing is often quite different from the actual sounds that are hitting our eardrums.This carefully-edited book includes an introduction, Revealing Mistakes, and questions for discussion at the end of each chapter: I. Eclectic Beginnings - Music, art, philosophy, and philosophical psychologyII. Tones, Pitches and Critical Values - Intriguing results in music and memoryIII. The Octave Illusion - How to confuse the brain with tonesIV. Medical Applications - A highly suggestive result for epilepsy patientsV. Eyes vs. Ears - The neurophysiological differences between vision and hearingVI. Gut Issues - The impact of discomfortVII. The Scale Illusion - Auditory scene analysis and evolutionary factorsVIII. Surrounded by Illusions - From the Glissando Illusion to Tchaikovsky's 6thIX. Perfect Pitch & Tone Languages - Why Mandarin might help your musicianshipX. Towards Monotony? - The tonal implications of globalizationXI. Embracing Discomfort - The benefits of being confusedAbout Ideas Roadshow Conversations Series: This book is part of an expanding series of 100+ Ideas Roadshow conversations, each one presenting a wealth of candid insights from a leading expert in a focused yet informal setting to give non-specialists a uniquely accessible window into frontline research and scholarship that wouldn't otherwise be encountered through standard lectures and textbooks. For other books in this series visit our website: https://ideasroadshow.com/.

The Conversation

I. Eclectic Beginnings

Music, art, philosophy, and physiological psychology

HB: I’d like to talk about your personal history and how you got involved in this line of musical research. Have you always been passionate about music?

DD: Yes, music was a passion of mine from a very early age. I wanted to go to the Royal Academy of Music to study composition and piano, but my parents talked me out of it, saying that I’d never earn a living that way. And even if I did earn a living, I’d have to travel all the time and would be very stressed. So I went to Oxford instead and studied psychology and philosophy, but I always felt that my heart was in music.

HB: Piano was your primary instrument, I gather, but did you play other instruments as well?

DD: While both my parents were very musical, neither of them played an instrument, and we didn’t even have a piano in the apartment we lived in. However, when I was a very young child I had a friend who lived in an apartment on a floor above us. She had a piano, and I used to go over there and play around with it. At some point I must have been told the names of the notes, because I remember, when I was about four or so, being absolutely amazed that grown-ups had to go and stare at a keyboard in order to figure out what note was being played when they heard it.

I couldn’t understand how people couldn’t just hear a note and know exactly what it was right away. I remember being amazed, going from one person to another, to prove to myself that they couldn’t do it. At any rate, I hadn’t had any formal musical training at that time. I started serious musical training when I was six or so, and immediately plunged into it. That was when I really fell in love with music, and started practicing many hours a day.

HB: And your parents were supportive of this?

DD: They were, indeed.

HB: Where were you, exactly? Which part of England did you live in?

DD: I was in London at the time, and then I went to boarding school. It was very strict, with several negative qualities, but I was fortunate that they were also into music. As a result, they often let me out of class so I could go into the music rooms and practice the piano there. I did have good music teachers there, and for that I thank them.

HB: Where was the school?

DD: The school was called Christ’s Hospital or The Bluecoat School. The girls’ school was in Hertford and the boy’s school was in Horsham. Perhaps you’ve seen pictures of a Bluecoat boy dressed in a long, blue gown with yellow stockings and so on? The girls didn’t have that kind of costume, but we wore uniforms. The boys and girls met once every hundred years—

HB: Once every hundred years? How very English.

DD: Very much so. The school was founded in the 16th century; and indeed, we met once every hundred years. I remember we were given actual dresses to wear, and stockings, and we all trooped out to Horsham to meet with the boys, which was a very big deal for us.

HB: I can well imagine.

DD: But after five years there I felt I couldn’t take the extreme discipline any longer and I quit. I then went to a local school in London where I pretty much did my own thing. I was lucky to have a very sympathetic principal who didn’t insist that I show up at school every day, and as a result I spent an enormous amount of time on music.

HB: Growing up in London, I can imagine that you would have had all sorts of opportunities to listen to music, to go to concerts and to be engaged in a broader musical life. Were you able to partake in all that?

DD: Yes, to some extent. But I was also heavily involved with visual art—my father was a sculptor—and I spent a great deal of time at the British Museum studying art there, as well as The Tate Gallery and The National Gallery. Also, I spent a lot of time watching my father at work. More than anything else, really, I think that my strong feeling that science and music ought to be drawn together sprung from my discussions with him. He was very thoughtful, and I found his work very meaningful.

So that was a tremendous influence too: visual art. I think one can see that in my work, especially in my musical illusions, because a lot of them have analogs in visual art.

HB: Despite the fact that your father was a sculptor, he still deterred you from a career in composition and music.

DD: Well, yes; because it was a very hard life and he knew that from personal experience. He was determined to be an artist pure and simple: he would not do commercial art—and, as a result, he never had any money. So he felt that if I went into music, then I would never have any money either. He was probably right, too. That was their only concern, really, the economics of it.

HB: Was it difficult for you to then suddenly back away from music and go to Oxford to study philosophy and psychology?

DD: I was always interested in philosophy and psychology anyway—primarily philosophy, which I had studied alone quite intensively as a teenager. However, in those days at Oxford, you had to study philosophy along with something else, so I started off with philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) and then switched to philosophy, psychology and physiology (PPP), which was a very new program at the time.

HB: When you spoke earlier about how you had been captivated by philosophy as a teenager, what sorts of things are you referring to? What had particularly stimulated you?

DD: Well, at the time, I suppose big questions in philosophy like, How do I know that I exist? or How do I know that other people have thoughts? Of course, they continued to intrigue me as I progressed through my studies at Oxford.

HB: Did you continue to play music throughout your Oxford years? Did music still play a significant role in your life?

DD: Yes, indeed. I had a piano at home, and I did a lot of playing and improvising on the side. But at the time, I didn’t see it as feasible to be studying music formally in conjunction with psychology and philosophy; it just didn’t seem possible, and I was resigned to having music as a hobby.

However, when I arrived here at UC San Diego, people were just beginning to write software for generating music, in particular, Max Mathews at Bell Labs, wrote terrific software for producing music.

But I was able to use a different method. I used a computer to control a function generator so as to produce sine-wave tones in sequence, and these tones were very well-specified in frequency, amplitude, duration and pause. In that sense I was very lucky, because I began doing this type of work at a time when it was only just becoming possible.

HB: I’d very much like to get back to that, but I’m going to stubbornly return to Oxford, because I’m still imagining you as an undergraduate, and all of a sudden you’re at UCSD, so I need to fill in a few gaps here.

So, you’re playing music as a hobby while at Oxford studying psychology, philosophy and physiology—which seems like a rather broad spectrum, by the way—

DD: Well, we didn’t actually do all three of the “P’s”, as it were. You had to choose two of them.

HB: Which one did you leave out?

DD: I left out physiology, but I sort of studied it anyway. In fact, after I graduated, I wrote a textbook, together with my husband, called Physiological Psychology, which was the first textbook of its sort.

HB: That hardly sounds like leaving it out, then.

DD: No, not really, I suppose. However, it wasn’t part of my formal curriculum. And just to fill in more of the gaps for you, I went to Stanford initially, after I graduated from Oxford, to take graduate cou...