Abstract
A wide variety of crossmodal correspondences, defined as the often surprising connections that people appear to experience between simple features, attributes, or dimensions of experience, either physically present or else merely imagined, in different sensory modalities, have been demonstrated in recent years. However, a number of crossmodal correspondences have also been documented between more complex (i.e., multi-component) stimuli, such as, for example, pieces of music and paintings. In this review, the extensive evidence supporting the emotional mediation account of the crossmodal correspondences between musical stimuli (mostly pre-recorded short classical music excerpts) and visual stimuli, including colour patches through to, on occasion, paintings, is critically evaluated. According to the emotional mediation account, it is the emotional associations that people have with stimuli that constitutes one of the fundamental bases on which crossmodal associations are established. Taken together, the literature that has been published to date supports emotional mediation as one of the key factors underlying the crossmodal correspondences involving emotionally-valenced stimuli, both simple and complex.
Highlights
It is a fact widely acknowledged that music induces emotion in the listener (e.g., Juslin and Sloboda, 2010; Juslin and Västfjäll, 2008; Marin and Bhattacharya, 2010; North and Hargreaves, 2008; though for an exception in the case of musical anhedonia, see Mas-Herrero et al, 2014)
Additional support for the emotional mediation account was provided by the results of two further experiments in which Palmer et al.’s (2013) participants matched either the colour patches (Experiment 2) or the classical music selections (Experiment 3) to one of number of faces displaying a range of different emotional expressions
The results reported while undoubtedly fewer in number than for the music–colour matching documented in the preceding section, still do highlight how crossmodal correspondences may be established between complex auditory stimuli and complex visual stimuli
Summary
It is a fact widely acknowledged that music induces emotion in the listener (e.g., Juslin and Sloboda, 2010; Juslin and Västfjäll, 2008; Marin and Bhattacharya, 2010; North and Hargreaves, 2008; though for an exception in the case of musical anhedonia, see Mas-Herrero et al, 2014). It is the higher-pitched of two sounds that is matched with the brighter, or higher, of two visual stimuli, rather than there being a specific match between a sound having a particular pitch and a specific visual stimulus, or elevation, say It is the supposedly relative nature of the correspondences that stands in such striking contrast with early attempts to establish a more precise, or absolute, mapping between particular musical notes and specific hues; Sir Isaac Newton, for one, making a famous early suggestion along just these lines. Notice here how the circular organization of pitch and hue provides a natural mapping with the circumplex of affect (Russell, 1980; see Odbert et al, 1942; and see Fig. 1 below)
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