Painting and Music

Perceptive vs reflective: spectator interpretation of multimodal artworks

“…The ontological topography of music is complex and contested, yet a unifying characteristic, generally agreed upon throughout history, is music's ability to communicate emotions [10][11][12][13]. Apart from languages themselves, music is seen as one of the most complex and complete systems of communication, though due to the heightened dimensionality of musical signs, as well as a general lack of acquaintance with musical language for many people, communication through music is not exact [10,14].…”

“…Similarly to sense-making in music, the sense-making processes associated with abstract and contemporary art are reliant on individual interpretation to create meaning [20][21][22][23]. Music and abstract art contain a similar artistic vocabulary, using similar sensorial words to describe their attributes, such as colour, tone, and composition [13]. Another commonality is that our interactions with visual artworks, as with our interactions with sounds, are influenced by our biological and instinctive reactions to the artwork [24].…”

“…Our natural inclination to combine different senses, expanded by recent developments in technology, has led to a growing artistic genre and field of research into sonicvisual interaction [6,13,33]. An earlier study conducted by Parrott in 1982 sought to evaluate the emotional effects that pieces of romantic music had on early to mid-twentieth century paintings and vice versa [7].…”