The impact of visual-music interaction on music perception : the influence of agreement and disagreement.

Previous audiovisual cognition research has focused primarily on music's impact on visual perception. The goals of this study are to explore the impact of visuals on the perception of affective and acoustical qualities of music, and to develop a method for discussing the mood interactions of film and music. Text music and visual music analyses demonstrate two types of interactions: agreement and disagreement of moods. In an empirical investigation, participants were presented interactions in music and visual clips: agreeing music and visual, disagreeing music and visual, and music without visual. Participants were asked to rate acoustical properties using scales and adjective choice tasks. The results demonstrated an impact of visual mood on music perception: when in agreement, the mood was retained; when in disagreement, the visual's mood influenced the music's perception. The conclusions are applied to Cohen's associationist congruence model by describing a new communication pathway between music and visual in film music perception.