Diana Deutsch

Diana German ( * 1938 in London) is an English psychologist who has emerged particularly through contributions to the psychology of music.

She explores, inter alia, the perception and memory for 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

German educated at Oxford University, where she received a BA graduated in psychology, philosophy and physiology. Her PhD in psychology she earned at 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 performance.

Audible illusions

Among the discovered and explored by German deceptions include:

  • Octave illusion (1974 )
  • Scale Bluff (1974 )
  • Glissando illusion (1995 )
  • Tritone paradox
  • Cambiata Illusion ( 2003).

In the following illustrations, each red = right ear means blue = left ear.

Octave illusion

The test person are alternately presented via headphones to each ear two different tones. Your pitch is one octave. Example: The right ear hears alternately g and g ', the left ear at the same time alternately g' and g Virtually no one can hear properly, instead occur on different illusions. The most common perception is right ear g ', then g left ear, right ear then g', then left ear g etc.

This delusion is obtained even when the headset is turned over and the presented tones are now reversed. For right-handers this deception is much more stable; left-handers the pattern is reversed frequently, eg g right ear, left ear then g ', then g right ear, left ear then g', etc.

Scale Bluff

The test person via headphones to each ear presented a different tune.

This pattern results from the fact that at the same time playing two scales, one ascending, here for example from c to c ', the other descending, here from c' to c, but every time reversed left and right channels.

However, most subjects take now two completely different melodies, happened in one ear a scale from c ' down to f and back to c', on the other ear the gamut from c up to f and back to c.

This effect is also referred to as "melodic channeling" as seemingly chaotic tones are combined to form two ordered melodies. Right hear most right high, left the deep melody; Left-handed vary more.

A variant of the scale - deception is the " chromatic illusion " in which instead of a whole-tone scale a chromatic scale will be used.

Glissando illusion

A synthetic oboe tone (262 Hz), on the other hand, a pure tone glissando, the ± 1 octave ( 131-523 Hz ) on a channel-up and descends ( something like, two stereo speakers, two signals are simultaneously played a siren sounds ). These signals are all 0.2 seconds interchanged between the speakers, so you always hear a section of glissandos on one side of the oboe tone and on the other side. Perceived, however, is something else: is correctly heard as back and herspringend while the oboe sound, the glissando is reassembled in the head and back and herwandernd experienced as a continuous between the speakers, often in addition as in the room and descending. The most common listening experience is that the ascending glissando part is heard from left to right and from bottom to top, the descending part from right to left and from top to bottom wandering. For right-handers, this finding is again more stable than left-handers.

Cambiata Illusion

About stereo speakers or headphones a different tune is presented per channel.

However, is heard most often following illusion: in one ear can hear a repeating pattern of three alternating notes in the upper register, on the other ear also such a pattern in the lower register. Right hear right stable to high, left the low tones:

CDs

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

Writings

  • The psychology of music ( Eds.), 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. German and German JA (ed.), 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 paradoxical 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 ).
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