ArticleFrontiers in psychology2026
Associating (dis)consonance of harmonic intervals with emotional valences: exploring the visual representation of music through crossmodal associations.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The current paper investigates whether people associate certain emotions and visual features (specifically roughness, colour, and brightness) with different musical intervals. It was hypothesised that more dissonant intervals would be associated more with sadness and tragedy while more consonant intervals would be more strongly associated with happiness and hopefulness instead. It was further hypothesised that the relationship between intervals and emotional valence would be crossmodally mediated by roughness, brightness, and the warmth of colour. We also investigated whether providing an explanation of consonance and dissonance might affect participants' ratings. A total of 303 UK citizens rated the brightness, roughness, colour warmth, and associated emotions (sadness-happiness; tragic-hopeful) of 13 musical intervals. The results indicated that participants associated more dissonant intervals with sadness and tragedy, with the relationship between the dissonance of intervals and emotional attributes mediated through roughness, warmth of colour, and brightness. Furthermore, those participants who had been provided with an explanation rated the intervals as more dissonant, sadder, and more tragic. The results reveal that the different musical intervals present in musical modes are responsible for the different emotions that are typically associated with certain modes and this relationship can sometimes be mediated by features presented visually.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.