Crossmodal Correspondence between Music and Ambient Color Is Mediated by Emotion

Abstract

The quality of a concert hall primarily depends on its acoustics. But does visual input also have an impact on musical enjoyment? Does the color of ambient lighting modulate the perceived music quality? And are certain colors perceived to fit better than others with a given music piece? To address these questions, we performed three within-subjects experiments. We carried out two pretests to select four music pieces differing in tonality and genre, and 14 lighting conditions of varying hue, brightness, and saturation. In the main experiment, we applied a fully crossed repeated-measures design. Under each of the four lighting conditions, participants rated the musical variables ‘Harmonic’, ‘Powerful’, ‘Gloomy’, ‘Lively’ and overall liking of the music pieces, as well as the perceived fit of music and lighting. Subsequently, participants evaluated music and lighting separately by rating the same variables as before, as well as their emotional impact (valence, arousal, dominance). We found that music and lighting being similarly rated in terms of valence and arousal in the unimodal conditions were judged to match better when presented together. Accordingly, tonal (atonal) music was rated to fit better with weakly saturated (highly saturated) colors. Moreover, some characteristics of the lighting were carried over to music. That is, just as red lighting was rated as more powerful than green and blue lighting, music was evaluated to be more powerful under red compared to green and blue lighting. We conclude that listening to music is a multisensory process enriched by impressions from the visual domain.

Emotionally congruent music and text increase immersion and appraisal

“…The more similar music and text were evaluated in mood, the better the stimuli were regarded to match. This result is in agreement with our recent study showing that music and colored ambient lighting are judged to fit particularly well if they carry similar emotional connotations [ 79 ]. In the same vein, numerous investigations have identified emotional attributions as drivers for the mapping of music with various stimuli from other sensual domains (see [ 36 ], for a review).…”

Sensory translation between audition and vision

“…Hartshorne, 1934 ; Spence, 2020a ; von Helmholtz, 1878/1971 ; though see also Marks, 2011 ). Ultimately, therefore, it can be argued that the best that one can hope for as far as matching, or translating between, the senses is to use emotionally mediated correspondences (e.g., Cunningham & Weinel, 2016 ; Hauck et al, 2022 ; Spence, 2020a ; Spence & Di Stefano, 2022a , for a review). Evidence showing that basic emotions are recognized in musical stimuli across cultures (Fritz et al, 2009 ) would at least partially support the alleged universality of some elements of emotion-mediated translation from audition and vision.…”

Marble melancholy: using crossmodal correspondences of shapes, materials, and music to predict music-induced emotions

“…existing work has shown effects of videos on the emotional appraisal of music, as well as on the perception of musical features such as tempo and loudness (Boltz et al, 2009;Boltz, 2013). Another recent example is the study of Hauck et al (2022) in which musical emotion ratings have been shown to be shifted by lighting conditions such as hue, brightness, and saturation. For example, a musical piece paired with red light was rated as more powerful than the same musical piece paired with green or blue light.…”

“…And color has been shown to influence music-induced emotions. For instance, in a study by Hauck et al (2022), judgments on the emotional impact of musical pieces changed in accordance to the emotions attributed to colored lighting. This mechanism of "emotion transfer" has been found also between other senses.…”