Irène Deliège

Irène Deliège

Irène Deliège was a Belgian musician and cognitive scientist. She was born in January 1933 in Flanders but spent most of her life in French-speaking Brussels and Liège. She was known for her theory of cue abstraction and for her role in establishing the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music.

She was educated at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, where she obtained a diploma in music. She subsequently worked for twenty-five years as a classroom music teacher in the Belgian public school system.

Shortly after graduating, she attended courses in music writing and harmony given by Professor André Souris at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels. Through this connection she was invited to participate in the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, where she met the Belgian musicologist Célestin Deliège, whom she married in 1954.

In 1979 she returned to university study and later obtained a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the Université libre de Bruxelles, graduating in 1984. She was then invited by Professor Marc Richelle at the University of Liège to establish a Unit for Research in the Psychology of Music, in collaboration with the Royal Conservatory of Brussels and the Centre de Recherche et de la Formation musicales de Wallonie founded by the composer Henri Pousseur. The Unit operated from 1986 until her retirement.

At the same time, she undertook doctoral studies at Liège and was awarded a PhD in 1991 for her thesis on the psychological organisation of musical listening. Her scientific work provided some of the earliest and most influential empirical tests of major predictions arising from Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff’s Generative Theory of Tonal Music (1983). She developed innovative methods for investigating listeners’ perception of large-scale musical structure, extending beyond the prevailing focus on short musical fragments.

Deliège also explored these questions in relation to contemporary classical and atonal music, an area then largely neglected in the wider field. In addition, she made important contributions to research on the development of musical perception in infancy and childhood.