Color and emotion caused by auditory stimuli

Recent studies have shown correlations between perceived colors and aspects of a musical piece such as tonality, tempo and musical articulation. Other studies have demonstrated that major and minor tonalities of music trigger people to perceived a different hue of colors. The purpose of this study is to investigate the correlation between musical aspects and the attribution of colors and emotions, as well as to observe if a specific correlation exists in the population tested. Furthermore, the results of this experiment will be considered for a therapeutic application. We conducted an Internet-based experiment evaluating whether musical stimuli would be consistently linked to perceived emotions and colors. The stimuli consisted of short sound excerpts containing a variety of musical phrases played in different styles and on different instruments. Thus, we were able to gather more data than that obtained by similar past studies, because we tested with a larger variety of music. The result analysis shows that the combination of sound and ascribed emotion forms a more reliable prediction of color perception than emotion alone or sound alone. In addition, we found a number of correlations between perceived emotions and the spectrum of selected colors; however, these results have shown to be insufficient for a precise prediction.