Hearing and painting: Neuroaesthetic theoretical insights

Abstract

Painting is essentially a visual form of arts. Apparently, audition and the hearing system seem to be of no avail in the aesthetic experience felt by painters during the creative process of artistic visual patterns, and by beholders while painting viewing. But philosophers and modern neuroscience have challenged this kind of unimodal and classical framework of perception. Any perception, and more importantly the aesthetic one, is a complex multimodal process where all sensory inputs converge and interact along with cognition and behavior. Several of these multifaceted and intertwined interconnections between the visual and auditory sensory modalities are given in the neuroscientific literature. A striking and extensively studied example of such a relationship is auditory-visual synesthesia. On the other hand, the history of arts gives us to know many examples of painters that have been inspired by sounds or music or, conversely, of musicians that have used paintings to inspire their composition. Neuroaesthetics, an emerging field in the wider framework of neuroscience, is aimed at deciphering the neurobiological correlates of such aesthetic experiences. We argue that an in-depth neuroscientific study of these interactions between the auditory modality and the art of painting may help to better understand both the artistic processes and the neurobiology of multimodal perception.