Effects of Music on the Perception of Paintings

Abstract

This study tested the influence of musical style on observers' perceptions of representational and abstract paintings. Participants were thirty-six male and thirty-six female undergraduates who viewed eight paintings under one of three listening conditions: matching, non-matching, or no music. Participants rated each painting on four semantic-differential scales. Mean ratings were compared using MANOVAs. An interaction of painting style and listening condition (Wilks' lambda = .780, p < .05) showed participants' aesthetic experience of viewing the paintings was intensified when the paintings were accompanied by matching music. A main effect for music style (Wilks' lambda = .718, p < .01) showed participants thought all paintings were less active and more beautiful when accompanied by the impressionist music. There were no significant effects for gender.

The Perceptual and Aesthetic Aspects of the Music-Paintings Congruence

“…The second aim of this study was to replicate the previous findings that (a) paintings followed by congruent music were preferred compared to an incongruent situation [12,13,15]; and that (b) generally, background music induces higher aesthetic ratings of paintings compared to the "silent" situation [15].…”

“…Previous studies suggested that certain melodies are regularly associated with particular colors: while "sad" music (minor key) dominantly induces associations of blue, "happy" music (major key) is usually associated with yellow [10,11]. Other studies, which investigated the interaction of different styles or genres of music and visual arts (e.g., paintings and architecture) have found that the stylistic congruence between paintings and music increased the aesthetic evaluation [12,13]. For instance, paintings of Kandinsky are preferred while jazz music is playing in the background, whereas William Turner's paintings are preferred when followed by classical music [14].…”

Can music be figurative? Exploring the possibility of crossmodal similarities between music and visual arts

“…Neperud (1982) found that women showed less preference for artistic patterns than men, whereas men rate figurative, i.e., realistic, and abstract styles more favourably than women (see Polzella, 2000). In contrast, Farrell & Rogers (1982), Limbert & Polzella (1998), Lindauer (1990), and Koning & van Lier (2013) each found no evidence of gender differences. Besides, we are aware of no study reporting gender differences in the simultaneous presentation of music and paintings.…”

“…In exp. 1 we tested the first part of our hypothesis, based both on common sense and on the findings of other empirical studies (Koning & van Lier, 2013;Limbert & Polzella, 1998), that classical music is a good fit for figurative art, and jazz music for abstract art. We employed a wide selection of figurative and abstract paintings and 40 excerpts of instrumental classical and jazz music and asked participants to rate paintings' pleasantness combined either with classical music or jazz, or viewed in a silent condition.…”

“…A number of researchers have found agreement among participants as to which of several paintings (Cowles, 1935;Wehner, 1966) or visual patterns (Simon & Wohlwill, 1968) match particular musical excerpts, both in adults and children (Hasenfus, Martindale, & Birnbaum, 1983), but no study at present has found a general rule for "the good match". Limbert and Polzella (1998), in trying to understand the relationship between visual arts and music, matched four impressionist paintings with a two minutes excerpt by Ravel and four abstract paintings with a two minutes excerpt by Weber. They found that, with regards to paintings, matching music affected the level of aesthetic appreciation of paintings.…”