How music touches: Musical parameters and listeners’ audio-tactile metaphorical mappings

Abstract

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.

Auditory and Visual Crossmodal Correspondences With Haptically Perceived Liquid Viscosity

“…However, weight, elasticity and adhesion of solid objects may be thought of as similar to the viscosity of liquid objects, since they all directly relate to the resistance an object puts up to movement. Thus, based on the findings of Eitan and Rothschild (2010), Slobodenyuk et al (2015), Walker et al (2010) and Ward et al (2008), we can predict that high viscosity should be matched with low luminance and low pitch. Based on Slobodenyuk et al, the relationship between saturation and viscosity is likely to be non-linear -however, since we are using a two-alternative forced choice (2AFC) paradigm this relationship may not be apparent; rather, this CMC is likely to be weakly significant or nonsignificant (a non-significant result here may, of course, also indicate the lack of a CMC).…”

“…However, the vast majority of research on CMCs involving tactile dimensions has been about solid objects, a summary of which we present in Table 1. There are also multiple studies on the effect Eitan and Rothschild (2010) Flute (compared to violin)/high sharpness Eitan and Rothschild (2010) of tactile dimensions on conceptual dimensions such as perceived expensiveness (e.g. Harrar and Spence, 2013;Ludden and Van Rompay, 2015), liking (Michel et al, 2015), femininity (Etzi et al, 2016) and activeness (Walker and Smith, 1985), which we do not include in the table.…”

“…The second study on CMCs in liquids was rather different from the first; rather than rating liquids based on their scents, Eitan and Rothschild (2010) asked participants to rate various musical notes on a scale from 'wet' to 'dry' (among other metaphorical attributes; see Table 1 for further examples). Here, participants were more likely to rate high-pitched, violin and non-vibrato notes as drier than low-pitched, flute and vibrato notes, respectively.…”

Embodied Listening and Timbre

“…Multisensory interaction between hearing and touching is not unique to timbre: neurophysiological slipperiness between these sense modalities has been explained by the broad functional overlap of auditory and tactile sensory regions (Foxe et al, 2002;Schür-mann, Caetano, Hlushchuk, Jousmäki, & Hari, 2006). Eitan and Rothschild (2010) found that metaphors of tactile engagement are ubiquitous in listeners' conceptualization of pitch height, loudness, and timbre. Of these, timbre-particularly noisy timbre-is a uniquely transparent locus of tactile mapping, as reflected in common metaphoric vocabulary for qualities of sound (e.g., ''harsh,'' ''rough,'' ''coarse'') (Wallmark, 2014).…”

De la thermoception à la perception auditive : en quête de l’identité du son « froid »

“…Par exemple, Eitan et Rothschild (2010) ont testé la pertinence de métaphores tactiles pour la description des sons. Les participants à cette étude devaient évaluer la qualité sonore d'un ensemble de stimuli, variant en intensité, en hauteur et en timbre, suivant six échelles sémantiques bipolaires :…”