Perceived structure of abstract paintings as a function of structure of music listened to on initial viewing

Abstract

Marks (1978) described a sensory unity theory that postulated that common dimensions of experience exist across sensory modalities, allowing each modality to affect the others. We examined whether structural judgments of visual stimuli made by male and female subjects would be influenced by exposure to auditory stimuli. Twenty-eight subjects saw a sequence of identical slides of abstract paintings. One group listened to avant-garde music while viewing the slides; the other group listened to minimalistic music. Afterward, subjects rated each of the paintings on semantic-differential scales. We hypothesized that the subjects would rate the paintings according to the structural qualities of the music they had heard. Significant effects of music condition supported hypotheses for the evaluation and activity dimensions only. Also, a significant interaction between sex and music condition was found for the potency dimension, with females rating the paintings more like the music they had listened to and males showing the opposite tendency. We interpreted the interaction in terms of emotional differences between the sexes. It was postulated that cross-modal diffusion may affect both cognitive and emotional processes.