Seeing Scent in Sound: Exploratory Spontaneous Visual and Olfactory Mental Imagery Elicited by Musical Modes

Musical modes (i.e., different patterns of pitch organisation within a scale) are widely recognised for their emotional character, yet little is known about the broader multisensory associations that listening to them might trigger. In the present exploratory study, we examine whether the full set of Western musical modes elicits systematic patterns of visual and olfactory mental imagery and whether these patterns correspond with how listeners spontaneously group the modes. In all, 249 participants generated open-ended visual and olfactory responses while listening to short modal excerpts and subsequently completed a free-sorting task. The results revealed a number of structured and recurrent imagery themes across participants (e.g., Nature-, Daytime-, and Happiness-related imagery for major modes, versus Dark-, Stress- and Sadness-related imagery for minor modes, alongside Floral-and-Fresh- versus Damp-, Dusty- and Smoke-related olfactory associations). Major and minor modes occupied distinct regions of similarity space across both visual and olfactory modalities; however, meaningful differentiation was also evident at the level of individual modes. This consistent relational structure across visual and olfactory imagery was likewise reflected in the grouping patterns observed in the free-sorting task. Together, these findings indicate that musical modes are associated with multiple sensory representations that extend beyond simple feature-level correspondences. These results therefore provide an exploratory mapping of visual and olfactory mental imagery and establish a foundation for future confirmatory research.