Abstract
When people make cross-modal matches from classical music to colors, they choose colors whose emotional associations fit the emotional associations of the music, supporting the emotional mediation hypothesis. We further explored this result with a large, diverse sample of 34 musical excerpts from different genres, including Blues, Salsa, Heavy metal, and many others, a broad sample of 10 emotion-related rating scales, and a large range of 15 rated music–perceptual features. We found systematic music-to-color associations between perceptual features of the music and perceptual dimensions of the colors chosen as going best/worst with the music (e.g., loud, punchy, distorted music was generally associated with darker, redder, more saturated colors). However, these associations were also consistent with emotional mediation (e.g., agitated-sounding music was associated with agitated-looking colors). Indeed, partialling out the variance due to emotional content eliminated all significant cross-modal correlations between lower level perceptual features. Parallel factor analysis (Parafac, a type of factor analysis that encompasses individual differences) revealed two latent affective factors—arousal and valence—which mediated lower level correspondences in music-to-color associations. Participants thus appear to match music to colors primarily in terms of common, mediating emotional associations.
Highlights
Music–color synesthesia is a rare and interesting neurological phenomenon in which listening to music automatically and involuntarily leads to the conscious experience of color (Ward, 2013)
We correlated each of the average music–emotion ratings with the four Perceptual-MCAs of the colors chosen as going best/worst with the music, analogous to those defined in the previous section
These correlations reflect how the emotional properties of the music correspond to the properties of the colors chosen as going best/worst with them: for example, the extent to which people chose colors that were more saturated, darker, and redder when listening to more agitated-sounding music than when listening to calmersounding music
Summary
Music–color synesthesia is a rare and interesting neurological phenomenon in which listening to music automatically and involuntarily leads to the conscious experience of color (Ward, 2013). Only a small proportion of people have such synesthesia, recent evidence suggests that self-reported nonsynesthetes exhibit robust and systematic music-to-color associations (e.g., Isbilen & Krumhansl, 2016; Lindborg & Friberg, 2015; Palmer, Schloss, Xu, & Prado-Leon, 2013; Palmer, Langlois, & Schloss, 2016). Two general hypotheses have been proposed to explain such music-to-color associations in both synesthetes and nonsynesthetes: direct links and emotional mediation. Caivano (1994) proposed that the octave-based musical scale maps to the hue circle, luminosity to loudness, saturation to timbre, and size to duration. A well-documented example is that higher pitched tones are associated with lighter, brighter colors (e.g., Collier & Hubbard, 2004; Marks, 1987; Ward, Huckstep, & Tsakanikos, 2006)
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