How Visuals Influence the Emotion of Sound

For the last few years John Lewis have have advocated the power of emotional advertising to boost sales around Christmas. Adam and Eve DDB have used powerful covers of well known music to create an emotive poignancy long used by the film industry. I've always thought that really good films are made exceptional by a fantastic soundtrack. Think of the scene in Gladiator where Maximus rides around the Colosseum, commanding the troops to the sound of an epic musical score from Hans Zimmer. It's the combination of sound and visual that really give you goosebumps.

Famous photo of a boy hearing for the first time

Now scientists have teamed up with film composer Peter Kaye, in an interesting study that puts some science behind the art. Their findings give us some interesting things to think about. Volunteers were first played some emotionally neutral music that didn't contain any unusual distortion or sudden changes in pitch. Sound that has a clear mathematical pattern is perceived as friendly. When animals and people are played music with unusual patterns they find it unpleasant. As expected, the latter caused distress when played to volunteers who had no visual cues. However, when people were shown a neutrally stimulating video at the same time as dissonant and normally unpleasant music; subjects were less likely to become disturbed.

So what does this mean to us as marketers? This study is the first to scientifically show that visual cues override audio ones when we make an emotional judgement. A friend of mine who composes music for tv ads recently complained to me that the music always comes last in the creative process. This study seems to suggest that we are correct to do this. When we make an irrational, emotional choice we focus on the visual first and the audio second.

It also means that we could potentially make unpleasant audio situations better by showing pleasant visualisations. Think pretty screensaver visualisations on a baby's forehead when it's screaming, or a noisy factory with tasteful wallpaper. Dragon's Den here I come.