The Conversation
I.
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...