Colour Association with Music Is Mediated by Emotion: Evidence from an Experiment Using a CIE Lab Interface and Interviews

Abstract

Crossmodal associations may arise at neurological, perceptual, cognitive, or emotional levels of brain processing. Higher-level modal correspondences between musical timbre and visual colour have been previously investigated, though with limited sets of colour. We developed a novel response method that employs a tablet interface to navigate the CIE Lab colour space. The method was used in an experiment where 27 film music excerpts were presented to participants (n = 22) who continuously manipulated the colour and size of an on-screen patch to match the music. Analysis of the data replicated and extended earlier research, for example, that happy music was associated with yellow, music expressing anger with large red colour patches, and sad music with smaller patches towards dark blue. Correlation analysis suggested patterns of relationships between audio features and colour patch parameters. Using partial least squares regression, we tested models for predicting colour patch responses from audio features and ratings of perceived emotion in the music. Parsimonious models that included emotion robustly explained between 60% and 75% of the variation in each of the colour patch parameters, as measured by cross-validated R 2. To illuminate the quantitative findings, we performed a content analysis of structured spoken interviews with the participants. This provided further evidence of a significant emotion mediation mechanism, whereby people tended to match colour association with the perceived emotion in the music. The mixed method approach of our study gives strong evidence that emotion can mediate crossmodal association between music and visual colour. The CIE Lab interface promises to be a useful tool in perceptual ratings of music and other sounds.

What color do you feel? Color choices are driven by mood

“…Contrary to expectations, we found little evidence for an association between blue and induced relaxation and even less so for induced sadness . While blue was the most frequent hue choice matched to relaxation, blue choice was not more common than any other hue, meaning that the difference with other hue choices was too low to be statistically reliable (i.e., may have occurred due to chance).…”

“…Music with faster tempo and in major mode (rated as “happy” music) was matched to more saturated, lighter, and yellower colors compared to music with slower tempo and minor mode (rated as “sad” music), which was matched to less saturated, darker, and bluer colors from a sample of 37 colors . Similar results were obtained when color selection was unrestricted: music expressing joy was linked to yellow, anger to red, and sadness to dark, blue colors . In another study, positively valenced music was represented with brighter colors than negatively valenced music .…”

“…Overall, cool hues were almost never matched to induced joy. The yellow‐joy link was previously observed using a varied array of emotion assessment techniques: affective words, affective drawings, affective music, and whole body expressions of emotion . Yellow also mainly represented self‐evaluated mood of participants within a general population .…”

“…4, 11, 15, 16, 20, 23, and 46), we opted for an unrestricted color range (similar to Refs. 22, 48) because we had no a priori expectations of which colors would be most relevant to this task. We believe that unrestricted exploration and choice of color gives the largest degree of freedom to participants and provides the most honest representation of color‐affect associations.…”

“…); chroma defines the color “purity”—colors with low chroma appear grayish and dull; lightness defines how light the color is. Regarding hue, we expected yellow hue to be chosen for joy and blue hue for relaxation, fear, and sadness . Regarding lightness, we expected lighter colors to be matched to positive affective states (i.e., joy and relaxation) and that lightness of the matched colors may vary by arousal .…”