Associating (dis)consonance of harmonic intervals with emotional valences: exploring the visual representation of music through crossmodal associations

The current paper investigates whether people associate certain emotions and visual features (specifically roughness, colour, and brightness) with different musical intervals. It was hypothesised that more dissonant intervals would be associated more with sadness and tragedy while more consonant intervals would be more strongly associated with happiness and hopefulness instead. It was further hypothesised that the relationship between intervals and emotional valence would be crossmodally mediated by roughness, brightness, and the warmth of colour. We also investigated whether providing an explanation of consonance and dissonance might affect participants’ ratings. A total of 303 UK citizens rated the brightness, roughness, colour warmth, and associated emotions (sadness-happiness; tragic-hopeful) of 13 musical intervals. The results indicated that participants associated more dissonant intervals with sadness and tragedy, with the relationship between the dissonance of intervals and emotional attributes mediated through roughness, warmth of colour, and brightness. Furthermore, those participants who had been provided with an explanation rated the intervals as more dissonant, sadder, and more tragic. The results reveal that the different musical intervals present in musical modes are responsible for the different emotions that are typically associated with certain modes and this relationship can sometimes be mediated by features presented visually.