ABSTRACT

Like the mercilessly overcited Monsieur Jourdain, music practitioners and scholars have been engaged with cross-modal correspondences for centuries without knowing it. 1 Musicians use cross-modal correspondences (CMC)—“systematic associations found across seemingly unrelated features from different sensory modalities” (Parise, 2016)—when employing Western music notation, where “higher” pitch is located higher on the page, and changes in loudness are depicted by changes in spatial width (i.e., crescendo and diminuendo wedges); when, as composers or improvisers, they apply slow, pianissimo, muted or low-register sound to depict a dark night; or when (as conductors) they use rising or expanding hand gestures to enhance an orchestral or choral crescendo. Such commonplace musical activities—as well as the most basic terms of music-related vocabulary, like “high” or “low” tones (associating musical pitch and spatial location), “bright” sound (associating musical timbre with visual luminosity), or “soft” sound “volume” (associating loudness with both touch and size)—all indeed employ systematic associations between musical features and “seemingly unrelated” features of non-auditory modalities.