The crossmodal correspondence between auditory pitch and visuospatial elevation (in which high- and low-pitched tones are associated with high and low spatial elevation respectively) has been proposed as the basis for Western musical notation. One implication of this is that music perception engages visuospatial processes and may not be exclusively auditory. Here, we investigated how music perception is influenced by concurrent visual stimuli. Participants listened to unfamiliar five-note musical phrases with four kinds of pitch contour (rising, falling, rising-falling, or falling-rising), accompanied by incidental visual contours that were either congruent (e.g., auditory rising/visual rising) or incongruent (e.g., auditory rising/visual falling) and judged whether the final note of the musical phrase was higher or lower in pitch than the first. Response times for the auditory judgment were significantly slower for incongruent compared to congruent trials, i.e., there was a congruency effect, even though the visual contours were incidental to the auditory task. These results suggest that music perception, although generally regarded as an auditory experience, may actually be multisensory in nature.

中文翻译：

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跨模态视觉空间对音乐轮廓听觉感知的影响。

听觉音高和视觉空间高度之间的交叉模式对应（其中高音和低音分别与高和低空间高度相关联）已被提出作为西方音乐符号的基础。这意味着音乐感知涉及视觉空间过程，可能不完全是听觉。在这里，我们研究了音乐感知如何受到并发视觉刺激的影响。参与者聆听具有四种音高轮廓（上升、下降、上升-下降或下降-上升）的不熟悉的五音符乐句，伴随着一致的（例如，听觉上升/视觉上升）或不一致的附带视觉轮廓（例如，听觉上升/视觉下降）并判断乐句的最后一个音符在音高上是高于还是低于第一个。与一致试验相比，不一致的听觉判断的响应时间显着慢，即存在一致效应，即使视觉轮廓对听觉任务是附带的。这些结果表明，音乐感知虽然通常被认为是一种听觉体验，但实际上可能是多感官的。