Music and video iconicity: Theory and experimental design

Abstract

Experimental studies on the relationship between quasi-musical patterns and visual movement have largely focused on either referential, associative aspects or syntactical, accent-oriented alignments. Both of these are very important, however, between the referential and areferential lays a domain where visual pattern perceptually connects to musical pattern; this is iconicity. The temporal syntax of accent structures in iconicity is hypothesized to be important. Beyond that, a multidimensional visual space connects to musical patterning through mapping of visual time/space to musical time/magnitudes. Experimental visual and musical correlates are presented and comparisons to previous research provided.