Color, Music, and Emotion: Bach to the Blues

Abstract

When people make cross-modal matches from classical music to colors, they choose colors whose emotional associations fit the emotional associations of the music, supporting the emotional mediation hypothesis . We further explored this result with a large, diverse sample of 34 musical excerpts from different genres, including Blues, Salsa, Heavy metal, and many others, a broad sample of 10 emotion-related rating scales, and a large range of 15 rated music–perceptual features. We found systematic music-to-color associations between perceptual features of the music and perceptual dimensions of the colors chosen as going best/worst with the music (e.g., loud, punchy, distorted music was generally associated with darker, redder, more saturated colors). However, these associations were also consistent with emotional mediation (e.g., agitated -sounding music was associated with agitated -looking colors). Indeed, partialling out the variance due to emotional content eliminated all significant cross-modal correlations between lower level perceptual features. Parallel factor analysis (Parafac, a type of factor analysis that encompasses individual differences) revealed two latent affective factors— arousal and valence —which mediated lower level correspondences in music-to-color associations. Participants thus appear to match music to colors primarily in terms of common, mediating emotional associations.