Psychologists identify the musical triggers of beauty and the sublime

A new small study reveals that minor musical keys tend to evoke a sense of the sublime, while major keys are more closely associated with beauty. When people experience music and images simultaneously, the visual elements dominate their overall aesthetic response. The research was published in the Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.

Philosophers have historically separated the concepts of beauty and sublimity. Beauty is typically tied to harmony, order, and pure pleasure. Sublimity describes a different kind of aesthetic reaction, one linked to astonishment, grandeur, and sometimes a hint of fear or ambiguity. Sublimity is often described as the sensation of being overwhelmed by something vast or powerful.

In the eighteenth century, thinkers like Edmund Burke argued that the sublime stems from feelings of awe and terror, while beauty arises from feelings of love and affection. Most modern psychology research on these experiences has focused exclusively on visual art or photographs. The aesthetic qualities of music have received much less attention in experimental settings.

Researchers Young-Jin Hur, Radvile Medeisyte, and I. Chris McManus from University College London wanted to test how these categories apply to auditory experiences. Hur, the lead author who is also affiliated with the University of the Arts London, sought to identify which specific musical features trigger feelings of beauty versus the sublime. The research team also set out to measure what happens when people experience audio and visual media at the same time.

Musicologists have frequently used the language of the sublime and the beautiful to describe different compositions. Sublime music is often characterized by escalating dissonance, rapid transitions, and emotional ambiguity. Beautiful music is typically described as flowing, elegant, and harmonious.

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The small study included 39 university students. The participants sat in a darkened room and evaluated different forms of media. They rated the stimuli on a grid that measured both sublimity and beauty simultaneously.

In the first part of the experiment, participants viewed 18 photographs projected onto a wall. These images were selected based on a framework designed to ensure a wide spread of emotional triggers. The pictures ranged from peaceful meadows representing high beauty to erupting volcanoes representing high sublimity.

The image ratings confirmed previous findings about visual aesthetics. This initial step acted as a baseline for the rest of the experiment. It established a reliable metric for how each participant individually judged the baseline visual materials.

Next, the participants listened to 36 brief classical piano excerpts. These included pieces by Johann Sebastian Bach, Frédéric Chopin, and Arnold Schoenberg. The musical selections were chosen to represent three distinct stylistic periods, specifically the Baroque, Romantic, and Modernist eras. By using solo piano music, the research team could control for variables like lyrics or the varying sounds of a full orchestra.

The excerpts varied by musical key, including major, minor, and atonal structures. They also varied by tempo, categorized broadly as slow or fast. Atonal music lacks a traditional home key, often sounding unresolved or dissonant to listeners accustomed to conventional Western melodies.

The researchers found that the musical key was the primary driver of a participant’s reaction. Excerpts in a major key were rated as highly beautiful. In contrast, pieces in a minor key were heavily associated with feelings of sublimity. The minor key has long been linked to sadness or melancholy in music psychology, which aligns with the negative emotional elements traditionally associated with the sublime.

Tempo had a much lesser effect on the ratings. Faster music elicited slightly more sublimity than slower music, but tempo did not alter the perception of beauty. The atonal pieces by Schoenberg scored low in both beauty and sublimity.

The researchers noted that atonal music might require specialized knowledge to be fully appreciated. While it scored low on these specific aesthetic scales, atonal compositions are routinely featured in concert halls and film scores. In cinema, dissonant music is highly effective at building tension or evoking fear.

In the final stage of the experiment, the researchers combined the media types. Participants experienced a random pairing of a photograph and a musical excerpt. They were asked to rate the combined audiovisual experience using the same sublimity and beauty scales.

Modern life is filled with combined auditory and visual experiences, from video games to cinema. Past research has shown that background music can alter the emotional interpretation of film scenes. Scientists have rarely measured how the specific feelings of sublimity and beauty blend across different senses.

The researchers wanted to know if the audio or the visual component would hold more weight in shaping the overall aesthetic reaction. Visual information largely overpowered the auditory information. The sublimity of the photograph influenced the final sublimity rating more than twice as strongly as the accompanying music did, and the beauty of the photograph influenced the final beauty rating almost three times as strongly as the music did.

The research team also noticed a strict separation in how these aesthetic judgments formed. The sublimity of a mixed audiovisual pairing was driven exclusively by the sublimity of its separate visual and musical parts, not by their beauty. Conversely, the beauty of the mixed pairing was predicted only by the beauty of the individual parts, not by their sublimity.

This suggests that while beauty and sublimity are related aesthetic experiences, they operate through independent psychological mechanisms. When multiple senses are engaged, the brain seems to calculate the total beauty of a scene separately from its total sublimity.

The study does have limitations, particularly regarding its participant pool. The research relied on a limited group of subjects, mostly female university students in the United Kingdom. This demographic restricts how broadly the conclusions can be applied.

The musical selections and images are rooted in Western cultural expectations. Different cultural backgrounds might alter how individuals perceive major keys, minor keys, and atonality. Future research could explore how musical preferences or formal music education shape aesthetic reactions in diverse populations.

The fixed sequence of the experiment could have influenced the outcomes. Because the mixed audiovisual pairings always came last, participants might have experienced fatigue by the final round. Future studies might randomize the presentation order to eliminate this potential issue.

The study, “Cathedrals of Sound: Predictors of the Sublime and the Beautiful in Music, Images, and Music With Images,” was authored by Young-Jin Hur, Radvile Medeisyte, and I. Chris McManus.