The colour of music

Music hath powers to soothe and uplift. How often have you turned to it to reinforce elation or to pour a balm on an emotional wound? There is no doubt that music has a direct line to your emotions and according to a new study it seems that music also generates perceptions of colour that transcend individual differences.

This was shown in research involving people who listened to 18 classical music pieces by JS Bach, Mozart and Brahms. The pieces varied in tempo from slow to medium to fast and were either in major or minor keys.

In the experiment, subjects had to pick five colours that best suited the music they were listening to from a palette of 37 colours. The palette consisted of vivid, light, medium and dark shades of red, orange, yellow, yellow-green, green, blue-green, blue and purple.

The results showed people pair faster music in a major key with lighter, more vivid yellow colours. By contrast, people match slower music in a minor key with darker more blue tones. For instance, Mozart’s bright Flute Concerto No. 1 in G major was associated with bright yellow and orange whereas his Requiem in D minor is linked to dark blue-ish and grey.

The consistency in this association was remarkable with the researchers saying they can predict colour association with music with 95 per cent accuracy. These results held true whether the people in the study were from the US or Mexico, so the correlation between music and colour seems to be cross-cultural. This suggests that at some underlying brain level, your emotions link music and colour without you even thinking about it. It might explain conditions like synaesthesia where one sensory pathway leads another being stimulated on an involuntary level. It could also offer further ammunition to advertisers, filmmakers and musicians who want to add emotional punch to their music.

As the song says, I guess that’s why they call it the blues.