[4] Her father was a sculptor of the expressionist school, and she attributes her strong interest in relationships between art, science and philosophy to her many conversations with him in childhood.
[5] She entered St Anne's College, Oxford in 1956, and obtained a First Class Honors degree in psychology, Philosophy, and Physiology in 1959.
The illusions also demonstrate the importance of memory, knowledge and expectations to how we perceive music and speech, and point to strong connections between the brain systems responsible for these two forms of communication.
[citation needed] Two further illusions discovered by Deutsch also show the importance of unconscious inference – our use of memory, beliefs and expectations – in perception of music and speech.
Listeners are unable to identify a well-known melody when all its note names are correct, but the tones are placed randomly in different octaves.
This ability is very rare in the United States, but Deutsch discovered that it is far more prevalent among speakers of tone language, such as Mandarin or Vietnamese.
Deutsch proposed that, if given the opportunity, infants can acquire absolute pitch as a feature of their language, and this ability carries over into music.
Deutsch and Dooley also found that speakers of English with absolute pitch had unusually large digit spans for spoken words.
They proposed that this strong verbal memory makes it easier to develop an association between musical notes and their names in early childhood, furthermore to acquire absolute pitch.
She demonstrated that short-term memory for the pitch of a tone is the function of a specialized and highly organized system; where as, information is not subject to interference by other sounds such as spoken words.
In addition she integrated research and theory in different disciplines in her edited book "The Psychology of Music"; this became the standard Handbook in the field).
Deutsch has given many public lectures, including those at the Kennedy Center for Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., the Vienna Music Festival, The Exploratorium in San Francisco, The Fleet Science Center in San Diego, the Skeptics Society in Pasadena, the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, Italy, the Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (Centre Georges Pompidou) in Paris, France, and the Royal Swedish Academy of Music in Stockholm, Sweden.
These include Scientific American,[14] New Scientist, The Washington Post, The New York Times, U.S. News & World Report, Die Zeit (Germany), Der Spiegel (Germany), Forskning (Norway), NZZ am Sonntag (Switzerland) and Pour La Science [fr] (France), among others.