The Color of Music: Correspondence through Emotion

Abstract

College students listened to four song clips. Following each clip, the students indicated which color(s) corresponded to each of the four songs by distributing five points among eleven basic color names. Each song had previously been identified as either a “happy” or “sad” song. Each participant listened to two “happy” and two “sad” songs in random order. There was more agreement in color choice for the songs eliciting the same emotions than for songs eliciting different emotions. Brighter colors such as yellow, red, green, and blue were usually assigned to the happy songs and gray was usually assigned to the sad songs. It was concluded that music-color correspondences occur via the underlying emotion common to the two stimuli.