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Though the relationship of touch and sound is central to music performance, and audio-tactile metaphors are pertinent to musical discourse, few empirical studies have investigated systematically how musical parameters such as pitch height, loudness, timbre and their interactions affect auditory–tactile metaphorical mappings. In this study, 40 participants (20 musically trained) rated the appropriateness of six dichotomous tactile metaphors (sharp–blunt, smooth–rough, soft–hard, light–heavy, warm–cold and wet–dry) to 20 sounds varying in pitch height, loudness, instrumental timbre (violin vs. flute) and vibrato. Results (repeated measures MANOVA) suggest that tactile metaphors are strongly associated with all musical variables examined. For instance, higher pitches were rated as significantly sharper, rougher, harder, colder, drier and lighter than lower pitches. We consider several complementary accounts of the findings: psychophysical analogies between tactile and auditory sensory processing; experiential analogies, based on correlations between tactile and auditory qualities of sound sources in daily experience; and analogies based on abstract semantic dimensions, particularly potency and activity.

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Musicians have traditionally referred to musical features and events in terms of spatial location or movement (e.g., high and low pitch, rising and falling melody). Current empirical research reveals that basic auditory features, like pitch or loudness, are indeed consistently mapped in perception or cognition onto aspects of physical space and bodily motion, mappings often independent of the actual motion or location of the sound sources involved. This chapter reviews research examining how auditory pitch and loudness are associated perceptually or cognitively with aspects of space and motion, such as spatial directions in three-dimensional space, speed, and physical size. While also surveying the considerable body of research that has investigated these relationships using rarified auditory and visual stimuli, the chapter emphasizes recent studies using musical or music-like contexts. These studies begin to reveal the matrix of perceived musical space—a surprisingly complex web of correspondences and interactions among auditory and spatio-kinetic features.