A new paper by Planning Group A01, Dr.Asano, and her research team has just been published in Consciousness and Cognition.

 Previous research has shown that, when asked to select a colour that intuitively matches a musical note, many people tend to choose a bright, vivid yellow for major notes and a darker, less vivid blue for minor notes. Experiments in the current study showed that people who were more likely to categorically identify major and minor tones associated different colours with major chords and minor chords more than those who did not.

  The phenomenon of perceiving a particular link between different types of information (and in a highly common way among many people), such as perceiving that a particular colour matches a chord, is called crossmodal correspondence. This study's results show that cross-sensory correspondence can occur when a person's perception of one type of information (chords in this case) is projected onto another (colours in this case), such that 'similar chords are associated with similar colours and different chords with different colours'. These results bring us closer to understanding the mechanism by which qualia of various types of information are linked in the brain.

 The full text is available to read in Open Access. We would be very happy if you did.

Paper Information

Authors: Sayaka Harashima, Kazuhiko Yokosawa, & Michiko Asano

Title: Categorical tonality perception modulates crossmodal correspondences between musical chords and colors

Journal： Consciousness and Cognition, Volume 132, Article number 103886 (2025)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.concog.2025.103886 

Abstract: 

 We investigated the influence of categorical perception on crossmodal correspondence by examining whether the chord-color crossmodal mapping differs depending on the degree of categorical perception of musical chords within individuals rather than on their physical properties. The experiment used morphed chords of pure tones graded from minor to major. Participants, who were classified as either categorizers or non-categorizers using chord tonality identification and discrimination tasks, selected a color that they thought matched each chord. The results showed that only categorizers selected similar colors for within-category chord pairs and dissimilar colors for between-category chord pairs. The findings of this study suggest that in crossmodal correspondences, categorizers may organize the relationship between features in a sensory space, and this relationship is isomorphically projected onto the relationship of other associated sensory features.