Consonance shapes the multisensory and emotional mappings of musical intervals across English- and Mandarin-speakers

Journal article

The exploration of sound's multisensory attributes has become increasingly central to the cognitive science of music, yet research has largely focused on a limited set of sensory dimensions, often within a single modality. Moreover, the extent to which these associations are consistently perceived by listeners from different countries and linguistic backgrounds remains an open question. To address this issue, we conducted a comprehensive investigation of how two groups of listeners—146 English-speakers from North America and the United Kingdom and 64 Mandarin-speakers from China—map harmonic intervals onto 23 sensory and affective dimensions spanning vision, touch, taste, and emotion. Our results revealed consistent associations across groups between musical intervals and gustatory, tactile, visual, and emotional attributes. Importantly, these multisensory mappings clustered according to the consonance/dissonance dimension: consonant intervals were rated as more sweet, smooth, warm, round, symmetric, and bright, whereas dissonant intervals were rated as more rough, cold, spiky, asymmetric, and dark. Crucially, country of origin and language had minimal influence on these mappings, as statistical analysis based on model comparisons overwhelmingly favored simpler models without group interaction terms. These findings suggest that consonance–dissonance may serve as a core organizing principle underlying multisensory mappings of musical intervals.

Authors: Di Stefano, N; Ansani, A; Schiavio, A; Saarikallio, S; Toiviainen, P

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Wiley
• Journal: Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
• Volume: 1561
• Issue: 1
• Article number: e70337
• Publication date: 2026-07-23
• Acceptance date: 2026-05-27
• DOI: 10.1111/nyas.70337
• EISSN: 1749-6632
• ISSN: 0077-8923
• Language: English
• Keywords: consonance; crossmodal associations; dissonance; gradus suavitatis; multisensory