Poster Session II: Kandinsky was right: Few do "express bright yellow in the bass notes, or dark lake in the treble".

Abstract

Cross-modal correspondence is a sense of the inherent belongingness between two different senses; in our study these were pitch and color. Our goal was to investigate the confound in previous literature of individual differences in color brightness and pitch loudness. We tested twenty male participants. We determined equal brightness for each participant, across six colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and purple; and equal loudness across seven pitches: 125, 250, 500, 2000, 4000, 8000, and 12,500 Hz. Then participants matched pitch with color in three different conditions: prototypical color hues, gray scale, and isobright colors. Our results indicated that in the prototypical condition, the participants chose yellow for high pitches, and blue and purple for the lowest pitches. In the gray scale condition, they chose white for high pitches and black for low pitches. These findings are consistent with previous research in the literature. However, we found that when controlling for individual differences in brightness, participants still chose yellow with higher pitches. Thus, there appears to be an inherent sense of belongingness between yellow and high pitches, even when controlling for the confounds of individual differences in brightness and loudness.