Document Type

Conference Paper

Publication Date

2003

Publication Source

Poster session presented at the meeting of the Psychonomic Society

Abstract

Research on the perception of musical harmony indicates that combinations of tones tend to be judged consonant when their respective frequencies are reducible to simple ratios. This phenomenon was studied in the visual mode by using combinations of two blinking lights as stimuli. Eight, two-light combinations were created whose frequency ratios corresponded to those of eight common musical intervals, e.g., octave, fifth. In a pair comparison task, participants judged which one of two, two-light combinations appeared more harmonious or blended. The judgments were compared to those obtained from studies of musical harmony by regressing the scaled auditory preferences onto the raw preference counts obtained from the visual study. There was ahigh degree of correspondence between the two sets of data. The results suggest that the perception of harmony reflects similar mathematical properties in the visual and auditory domains.

Document Version

Postprint

Peer Reviewed

yes

Keywords

Cross-Modal Perception, Visual Harmony


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