{"id":3240,"date":"2021-03-30T15:57:44","date_gmt":"2021-03-30T20:57:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/read.streamapse.com\/?p=3240"},"modified":"2024-12-31T19:21:28","modified_gmt":"2025-01-01T00:21:28","slug":"attached-to-every-song-a-color-and-an-emotion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/?p=3240","title":{"rendered":"Attached To Every Song, A Color \u2013 And An Emotion"},"content":{"rendered":"

Imagine yourself as a graphic designer for New Age musician Enya<\/a>, tasked with creating her next album cover. Which two or three colors from the grid below do you think would \u201cgo best\u201d with her music?<\/p>\n

The electronic band STS9 is known for having intoxicating light shows accompany their live performances. Shannon Tompkins\/flickr<\/a>, CC BY-NC-ND<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Would they be the same ones you\u2019d pick for an album cover or music video for the heavy metal band Metallica<\/a>? Probably not.<\/p>\n

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Author provided<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

For years, my collaborators and I have been studying music-to-color associations<\/a>. From our results, it\u2019s clear that emotion plays a crucial role in how we interpret and respond to any number of external stimuli, including colors and songs.<\/p>\n

The colors of songs<\/h2>\n

In one study, we asked 30 people to listen to four music clips, and simply choose the colors that \u201cwent best\u201d with the music they were hearing from a 37-color array.<\/p>\n

In fact, you can listen to the clips yourself. Think about which two to three colors from the grid you would choose that \u201cgo best\u201d with each selection.<\/p>\n

Selection A.<\/div>\n

Selection B.<\/div>\n

Selection C.<\/div>\n

Selection D.<\/div>\n

The image below shows the participants\u2019 first-choice colors to the four musical selections provided above.<\/p>\n

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Author provided<\/span><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Selection A, from Bach\u2019s Brandenburg Concerto Number 2, caused most people to pick colors that were bright, vivid and dominated by yellows. Selection B, a different section of the very same Bach concerto, caused participants to pick colors that are noticeably darker, grayer and bluer. Selection C was an excerpt from a 1990s rock song, and it caused participants to choose reds, blacks and other dark colors. Meanwhile, selection D, a slow, quiet, \u201ceasy listening\u201d piano piece, elicited selections dominated by muted, grayish colors in various shades of blue.<\/p>\n

The mediating role of emotion<\/h2>\n

But why do music and colors match up in this particular way?<\/p>\n

We believe that it\u2019s because music and color have common emotional qualities. Certainly, most music conveys emotion. In the four clips you just heard, selection A \u201csounds\u201d happy and strong, while B sounds sad and weak. C sounds angry and strong, and D sounds sad and calm. (Why this might be the case is something we\u2019ll explore later.)<\/p>\n

If colors have similar emotional associations<\/a>, people should be able to match colors and songs that contain overlapping emotional qualities. They may not know that they\u2019re doing this, but the results corroborate this idea.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve tested our theory<\/a> by having people rate each musical selection and each color on five emotional dimensions: happy to sad, angry to calm, lively to dreary, active to passive, and strong to weak.<\/p>\n

We compared the results and found that they were almost perfectly aligned: the happiest-sounding music elicited the happiest-looking colors (bright, vivid, yellowish ones), while the saddest-sounding music elicited the saddest-looking colors (dark, grayish, bluish ones). Meanwhile, the angriest-sounding music elicited the angriest-looking colors (dark, vivid, reddish ones).<\/p>\n

To study possible cultural differences, we repeated the very same experiment in Mexico. To our surprise, the Mexican and US results were virtually identical, which suggests that music-to-color associations might be universal. (We\u2019re currently testing this possibility in cultures, such as Turkey and India, where the traditional music differs more radically from Western music.)<\/p>\n

These results support the idea that music-to-color associations in most people are indeed mediated by emotion.<\/p>\n

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The album cover designers for Enya\u2019s Shepherd Moons and Metallica\u2019s Master of Puppets may have subconsciously chosen colors that matched the emotional qualities of the respective artists\u2019 music.<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

People who actually see colors when listening to music<\/h2>\n

There\u2019s a small minority of people \u2013 maybe one in 3,000 \u2013 who have even stronger connections between music and colors. They are called chromesthetes, and they spontaneously \u201csee\u201d colors as they listen to music.<\/p>\n

For example, a clip from the 2009 film The Soloist shows the complex, internally generated \u201clight show\u201d that the lead character \u2013 a chromesthetic street musician \u2013 might have experienced while listening to Beethoven\u2019s Third Symphony.<\/p>\n