Effects of music on visual art: an eye movement study A Koning, R van Lier |
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Donders Institute, Radboud University Nijmegen, Netherlands
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| We investigated eye movements of participants watching paintings while listening to music simultaneously. The paintings were either from William Turner (landscape sceneries) or from Wassily Kandinsky (abstract art). The music was either classical (e.g Beethoven, Pastorale symphony 1st movement) or jazz (e.g. Move by Miles Davis). A rating experiment confirmed our intuitive notion that while classical music better fits landscape sceneries, jazz better fits abstract art. A second group of participants was presented with the same paintings (10 Kandinsky’s and 10 Turner’s) and musical excerpts (10 classical and 10 jazz excerpts) but now their eye movements were recorded. Two effects stood out. First, Jazz (but not Classical music) influenced the number of fixations with more fixations for Kandinsky’s than for Turner’s. Second, classical music (but not jazz) influenced mean saccade length, with shorter saccades for Turner’s than for Kandinsky’s. In sum, when looking and listening to works of art simultaneously, rhythmically dense music influences visual scanning with regard to frequency of eye movements while rhythmically sparse music influences visual scanning with regard to the amplitude of eye movements. In this way music differentially regulates eye movements and, with that, the exploration of a piece of art in time and space. |
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