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Why the Blues Are Blue

When y'all listen to a lively Mozart piece in a major key, what colors do you see? If vivid yellows and oranges swirled in your mind, it wouldn't surprise a grouping of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley.

Their new study institute that people associate upbeat, major-key music with lighter, more vibrant xanthous-toned colors, while slower music in modest keys actually gives people the blues.

These results were the same for participants in both California and United mexican states, suggesting humans may accept a surprisingly universal emotional color palette. [Eye Tricks: Gallery of Visual Illusions]

"The results were remarkably strong and consistent across individuals and cultures and conspicuously pointed to the powerful role that emotions play in how the human brain maps from hearing music to seeing colors," study researcher Stephen Palmer, a UC Berkeley vision scientist, said in a argument.

"Surprisingly, we can predict with 95 percent accuracy how happy or pitiful the colors people option will be based on how happy or sad the music is that they are listening to," Palmer added.

Palmer and his colleagues studied nearly 100 men and women, half in the San Francisco Bay Surface area and one-half in Guadalajara, Mexico. The participants listened to xviii varied pieces of classical music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Johannes Brahms. They also were given a 37-color palette and told to cull five colors that best matched each song.

Overall, most people chose an array of warm colors to accompany the upbeat songs and darker, grayer, bluer colors to go with the more somber ones.

The researchers saw the same design when they tweaked the experiment to employ facial expressions instead of colors — happy faces were matched with upbeat music in major keys, while sad faces were paired with gloomier tunes. The results suggest emotions are responsible for music-colour associations.

The scientists hope to expand their enquiry to written report other musical norms and cultures. Next, they plan to recruit participants in Turkey, where traditional music often uses scales beyond major and pocket-sized keys.

"We know that in Mexico and the U.S. the responses are very similar," Palmer said. "Just nosotros don't withal know most China or Turkey."

The study seems consistent with previous enquiry on color associations. One such study published in the periodical BMC Medical Research Methodology in 2010 found that people with low or anxiety were more likely to associate their mood with the color grayness, while happier people preferred yellow.

The new research was published this calendar week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and will be presented at the International Association of Colour conference at the Britain's University of Newcastle in July.

Follow us @livescience , Facebook & Google+ . Original article on LiveScience.com .

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