Experimental evidence demonstrates robust cross-modal matches between music and colors that are mediated by emotional associations. US and Mexican participants chose colors that were most/least consistent with 18 selections of classical orchestral music by Bach, Mozart, and Brahms. In both cultures, faster music in the major mode produced color choices that were more saturated, lighter, and yellower whereas slower, minor music produced the opposite pattern (choices that were desaturated, darker, and bluer). There were strong correlations (0.89 < r < 0.99) between the emotional associations of the music and those of the colors chosen to go with the music, supporting an emotional mediation hypothesis in both cultures. Additional experiments showed similarly robust cross-modal matches from emotionally expressive faces to colors and from music to emotionally expressive faces. These results provide further support that music-to-color associations are mediated by common emotional associations. color cognition | cross-modal associations | music cognition | emotion mediation hypothesis R esearchers have attempted to identify systematic links between music and color. Perhaps the most direct connection comes from the fascinating phenomenon of music-color synesthesia (1-4). A small minority of individuals, including some distinguished artists (e.g., Kandinsky and Klee) and musicians (e.g., Scriabin and Rimsky-Korsokov) report diverse cross-modal experiences of color while hearing musical sounds (1). Scientific studies initially failed to establish general correspondences because synesthetic sound-to-color mappings appeared idiosyncratic (3). Nonsynesthetic people also have music-to-color associations but do not actually experience colors while hearing music. Relatively low-level sound-to-color associations-e.g., higher pitches being associated with lighter colors (2, 5-7)-appear to hold for both synesthetes and nonsynesthetes (1). Reliable pitch-hue associations have been reported in children (8) although these effects were probably due to lightness, where spectral yellow and green (lightest) were associated with higher pitches, red and orange (midlightness) with midlevel pitches, and blue and violet (darkest) with lower pitches. There is evidence for other low-level auditory-visual associations such as timbre-saturation (9), loudness-brightness (7), and pitch-size (10, 11) [Spence (12)]. Other studies have investigated music-color correspondences at a higher level. Bresin found that music in the major mode was associated with lighter colors than music in the minor mode (13), but only two melodies were studied. Sebba reported that students used warmer, more saturated, lighter, and more highly contrasting colors in creating images while listening to a major Mozart selection than did students listening to a minor Albinoni selection (14). Again, only two musical selections were used, and students chose the musical selections rather than being randomly assigned, so students who are more inclined to choose major music may merely be more inclined to create images with warmer, more saturated, lighter, and more highly contrasting colors. Barbiere et al. found that "gray" was associated with sadder music whereas "red," "yellow," "green," and "blue" were associated with happier music (15), but only four musical selections were studied and, more importantly, no actual colors were presented in the selection task, but only words. How might music-to-color associations occur in nonsynesthetes? The two most plausible hypotheses are (i) the direct connection hypothesis that there are direct, unmediated associations between colors and musical sounds (3, 9, 16) and (ii) the emotional mediation hypothesis that color and music are linked through shared emotional associations (3, 8, (13) (14) (15) (17) (18) (19) .* Although some empirical support has been claimed for hypothesis ii, the small sets of colors and/or descriptors (15, 17, 18) , the small set of musical selections (13) (14) (15) 18) , and the potential relevance of cultural comparisons preclude firm conclusions. The present results demonstrate clear, robust connections between music and color that are widely shared across both individuals and cultures. They differ from previous findings in that they (i) associate specific dimensions of color (saturation, lightness, and yellowness-blueness) with specific high-level musical dimensions (tempo and mode), (ii) show clear evidence of mediation by emotional dimensions (happy-sad and angrycalm), and (iii) demonstrate a strong cultural invariance across US and Mexican participants. Specifically, people's experiences of 18 brief, classical orchestral selections that varied in tempo (slow/medium/fast), mode (major/minor), and composer (Bach/ Mozart/Brahms) are closely associated with the saturation, lightness, and yellowness of the colors they chose to "go best" with the music.
Related research on sound and color mappings has shown that strong associations between music and appearance can exist for nonsynesthetic individuals REF .
Music–color associations are mediated by emotion
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Psychology Medicine