connect music with color

When you listen to a sad song, what color comes to your mind? How about a happy tune, researchers have now shown that people tend to associate different colors with different songs, depending on how they feel. What's more, the effect appears to be challenging across different cultures, suggesting that it's a response we all share.

In a study led by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, about 100 volunteers from Mexico and the United States were asked to listen to 18 diverse classical pieces of music and to choose the color that best matched what they were listening to.

Scholars have found that spirited music tends to be associated with brighter colors, or yellow, while more murky, dark music in a minor key (such as Mozart's Recommended Requiem in D, has been linked to darker, austere colors and blues).

The search can lead to devices that produce moving images to match how we feel while listening to our favorite songs. It may also provide insight into synesthesia, a rare neurological condition in which the senses mix with one another, causing people to smoke words, for example, or the color of a scent. Many famous artists and musicians have reported color-like traits, including David Hockney, Franz Liszt, Tori Amos, and Pharrell Williams.