Irène Deliège

Irène Deliège (15 January 1933 – 11 May 2024) 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, Belgium. She was noted for her theory of Cue Abstraction, and for her work in establishing the European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music. She died on 11 May 2024 in Brussels.

Biography Irène Deliège was a cognitive scientist, specialising in music cognition. She was born in January 1933 in Flanders, Belgium.

She was educated at [details] and the Royal Conservatory of Brussels from where she obtained a diploma in music . For 25 years, she worked as a classroom music teacher in the Belgian public (state-funded) school system.

Shortly after graduating she began to attend the courses in composition and harmony given by Profressor Andre Souris at the Royal Conservatory of Brussels, and as a result was invited to attend the Summer School for New Music in Darmstadt (Darmstädter Ferienkurse), where she met the Belgian musicologist Célestin Deliège, whom she married in 1954.

In 1979 she returned to study and earned a bachelor's degree in psychology from the Free University of Brussels (Université libre de Bruxelles), graduating in 1984. She was then invited by Professor Marc Richelle, head of the Psychology Department at the University of Liège, to establish a Unit for Research in Psychology of Music, in association with the Royal Conservatory of Brussels and the Centre de Recherche et de la Formation musicales de Wallonie (CRFMW) founded by the composer Henri Pousseur. The unit existed from 1986 until her retirement in 199?

Simultaneously with establishing the unit, she embarked on PhD studies at Liège and was awarded her PhD in 1991. Her dissertation was L'organisation psychologique de l'écoute de la musique. Des marques de sédimentation indice, empreinte dans la représentation mentale de l'oeuvre (The psychological organisation of musical listening).

Deliège died on 11 May 2026, at the age of 91.

The European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music In 1991, she was elected the first permanent secretary of the newly founded European Society for the Cognitive Sciences of Music (ESCOM). This organisation, whose foundation she led, was in part a response to the earlier formation of the North American Society for Music Perception and Cognition (SMPC). In 1989 SMPC collaborated with the Japanese Society of Music Perception and Cognition to host the first International Conference of Music Perception and Cognition (ICMPC), held in Kyoto, Japan. At the second ICMPC, held in Los Angeles in 1992, Irène Deliège proposed that the third conference should be held in Europe, and that a biennial rotation between North America, Europe, and the Far East and Australasia should thereafter be maintained. Her proposals were accepted as the long-term structure for ICMPC, which recently held its 12th conference attended by over 500 delegates. ESCOM has been the European host for four ICMCPs to date (Liège 1994; Keele, UK 2000; Bologna, Italy 2006; Thessaloniki, Greece 2012).

Alongside the ICMPC, Deliège also took a leading role in the stimulation and organisation of European scientific meetings, and the editing of multi-author volumes dedicated to specialist topics within the field of music cognition. 2012 saw the first publication in a new series of Classic European Music Science Monographs, a project to commission and publish English translations of seminal historic European treatises on systematic and scientific musicology from 20th and earlier centuries. Translations are funded from a special "Irène Deliège Translation Fund" endowed to ESCOM in 2010.

In 1997, ESCOM founded a new scholarly journal, Musicæ Scientiæ. Its first editor was Irène Deliège, who held this position, as well as that of general secretary of ESCOM, until 2009. The journal has a unique remit, covering empirical science, artificial intelligence, education, systematic musicology, and philosophy. The publisher Sage took on the journal in 2009, and its impact factor in 2012 was 0.729.

Scientific contribution Deliège's scientific work involved some of the first, and certainly some of the most influential, attempts to empirically test major predictions of the work of Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff as laid out in their groundbreaking Generative Theory of Tonal Music (1983). This work involved novel methods for measuring perception of medium- to large-scale structure, up to and including entire works; going substantially beyond most scientific work of the time which concentrated (and, to a large extent does still) on perception of small, disembodied musical fragments. Another important aspect of her work was a courageous exploration of these issues as applied to contemporary classical music, including atonal works, another challenge largely neglected in the wider field. She also made important contributions to the understanding of the development of musical perception through infancy and childhood.