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Sound properties associated with equiluminant colours

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posted on 2023-06-09, 06:52 authored by Giles Douglas Iain Hamilton-Fletcher, Christoph Witzel, David Reby, Jamie WardJamie Ward
There is a widespread tendency to associate certain properties of sound with those of colour (e.g., higher pitches with lighter colours). Yet it is an open question how sound influences chroma or hue when properly controlling for lightness. To examine this, we asked participants to adjust physically equiluminant colours until they 'went best' with certain sounds. For pure tones, complex sine waves and vocal timbres, increases in frequency were associated with increases in chroma. Increasing the loudness of pure tones also increased chroma. Hue associations varied depending on the type of stimuli. In stimuli that involved only limited bands of frequencies (pure tones, vocal timbres), frequency correlated with hue, such that low frequencies gave blue hues and progressed to yellow hues at 800 Hz. Increasing the loudness of a pure tone was also associated with a shift from blue to yellow. However, for complex sounds that share the same bandwidth of frequencies (100–3200 Hz) but that vary in terms of which frequencies have the most power, all stimuli were associated with yellow hues. This suggests that the presence of high frequencies (above 800 Hz) consistently yields yellow hues. Overall we conclude that while pitch–chroma associations appear to flexibly re-apply themselves across a variety of contexts, frequencies above 800 Hz appear to produce yellow hues irrespective of context. These findings reveal new sound–colour correspondences previously obscured through not controlling for lightness. Findings are discussed in relation to understanding the underlying rules of cross-modal correspondences, synaesthesia, and optimising the sensory substitution of visual information through sound.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Multisensory Research

ISSN

2213-4794

Publisher

Brill Academic Publishers

Issue

3-5

Volume

30

Page range

337-362

Department affiliated with

  • Psychology Publications

Research groups affiliated with

  • Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2017-06-23

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2018-08-07

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2017-06-22

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