Beethoven’s last piano sonata and those who follow crocodiles: Cross-domain mappings of auditory pitch in a musical context

Cross-sensory correspondences and cross talk between dimensions of connotative meaning: Visual angularity is hard, high-pitched, and bright

“…The evidence suggests otherwise, however, and suggests that it is the close association between dimensions at the level of their connotative meaning that encourages them to share the same verbal labels. Thus, when Eitan and Timmers (2010) examined the terms used to label contrasting levels of pitch in different cultures, their equivalent of high and low was not always used to mark contrasting levels of auditory pitch. In these cases, their terms for light/heavy, sharp/blunt, small/big, thin/ thick, and weak/strong were often used instead.…”

“…For example, when people draw the visual imagery they experience when listening to short musical selections, they draw lines and forms that tend to be thinner, brighter, smaller, and more angular (sharper) the higher in pitch and/or faster in tempo the music is (Karwoski et al, 1942). And when presented with simple sounds, they judge higher-pitched sounds to be brighter, 2 faster, harder, higher in space, lighter in weight, sharper, and smaller than lower-pitched sounds (Collier & Hubbard, 2001;Eitan & Timmers, 2010;Hubbard, 1996;Marks, 1974Marks, , 1975Marks, , 1978Mondloch & Maurer, 2004;Perrott, Musicant, & Schwethelm, 1980;Walker & Smith, 1984).…”

That Sounds Sweet: Using Cross‐Modal Correspondences to Communicate Gustatory Attributes

“…Would participants from different cultural and hence musical backgrounds share similar sound-taste associations? On the one hand, sound-taste correspondences may be primarily driven by culture-specific linguistic or musical metaphors (e.g., using the adjective "sweet" to characterize a bundle of expressive properties in Western music; see also Eitan & Timmers, 2010). On the other hand, however, crossmodal correspondences between sound and taste may be based on more fundamental mechanisms (e.g., learning processes that are unaffected by culture, or the innate neural architecture; for a discussion see Spence & Deroy, 2012).…”

Crossmodal correspondences between odors and contingent features: odors, musical notes, and geometrical shapes

“…This hypothesis is also more true to the phenomena than the prediction derived from the semantic hypotheses (Martino & Marks 1999;) that all dimensions might ultimately be placed in some sort of correspondence via a general conceptual mapping. The transitivity hypothesis does not predict a consistent alignment from one dimension/modality to another: Many examples simply do not follow this rule; for example, high pitch corresponds to "small" but high elevation is "more," and low pitch is "large," but decreasing pitch "shrinks" (see Eitan, Schupak, Gotler, & Marks, 2013;Eitan & Timmers, 2010). In the olfactory domain, we need to explain why the correspondences between fruity odors and high pitch, and fruity odors and round shapes, do not map onto the correspondence between high-pitched speech sounds and angular shapes, noted in the audio-visual domain, while the two domains probably match regarding brightness (as higher pitch corresponds to both bright smells and bright visual surfaces).…”