Seeing or hearing? Feeling. The influence of music on paintings

Short Abstract: Music and paintings are two different means of conveying emotions. This study aimed to investigate how emotionally significant music can affect the perception of emotions elicited by artworks. For both visual and auditory stimuli emotional categories were Happiness, Relax, Fear, and Sadness. Paintings and music were paired in both congruent and incongruent ways. Participants were shown different paintings while listening to either congruent or incongruent background music. The task consisted in defining the emotional content of the observed artworks. Results showed how music can influence the perception of the emotions induced by visual art. Extended Abstract: Background: Music has been investigated in a variety of contexts, from music therapy to social cognition and moral judgments. Previous studies reported evidence of the influence of music on the perception and emotional evaluation of faces (Logeswaran & Bhattacharya, 2009). Moreover, Gerger et al. (Gerger et al., 2014) demonstrated how an art context promotes evaluation processes that influences the emotional experience of an artwork. Aims: The aim of the present study was to investigate how emotionally significant music can affect the perception of emotions elicited by artworks. It was hypothesized that listening to a musical piece with an incongruent emotional value compared to the emotion induced by a painting, would negatively affect the emotional categorization of the visual stimulus. Method: On the basis of a validation process, for both visual and auditory stimuli, the following emotional categories were considered: Happiness, Relax, Fear, and Sadness. Each emotional category comprised 48 different paintings. They were paired with either a congruent or an incongruent background music. Participants were 20 university students, who were asked to categorize the artworks on the basis of the emotion expressed. Results: A rmANOVA was performed on the artworks’ categorization judgements. Background music could be congruent, incongruent, or null (silence). The analysis revealed the significance of the background music factor (p = 0.042). Post-hoc tests showed significant differences between congruent and incongruent conditions, and between silence and incongruent conditions. Conclusions In the incongruent condition the ability to correctly categorize the emotions expressed by the paintings was significantly worse, as compared to the congruent and silence conditions, regardless of the emotional category. It is known that music has an effect on different cognitive abilities (Baumgartner et al., 2006; Jolij & Meurs, 2011; Proverbio & De Benedetto, 2018). This data confirm the view that background music can influence emotions aroused by other sensory channels, in this case, visual stimuli. Further, functional, research should explain when does the integration, and the corresponding influence, occur.