The Voice of Silent Films: Passing Affective Information From Sight to Sound

Research on multi-modal perception provides support for the hypothesis that visual information can influence aural experience (McGurk, 1976; Shutz & Kubovy, 2009). This research investigated the influence of visual information on affective auditory processing by pairing positively or negatively valenced film clips with emotionally “neutral” music. Participants provided subjective ratings of valence and arousal for each clip. After a short distraction test, participants listened to the music used in the experiment once again, this time without accompanying visual information. Participants were then asked to rate the valence and arousal of each audio recording. Affective information from silent-films will alter the perceived emotionality of “neutral” music. Specifically, we predict that affective information from short film clips will “bind” to relatively neutral music. The results were variable, perhaps stemming from a lack of ecological validity