Crossmodal Correspondence between Music and Ambient Color Is Mediated by Emotion

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.