We all know music can shift our mood. You have felt this yourself. A joyful song can lift you; a melancholy melody can bring quiet reflection. But what if music doesn’t just influence how we feel — what if it actually changes how we see?
Researchers at the University of Groningen explored this question and uncovered something remarkable: music may shape perception itself.
Psychologist Jacob Jolij and student Maaike Meurs asked participants to identify happy or sad smiley faces while listening to corresponding music. As expected, people were more accurate when the emotion of the face matched the music.
But here’s the twist – the most striking discovery came when no face was shown at all. Participants still reported seeing expressions that matched what they were hearing — happy faces with happy music, sad faces with sad music.
Why? The answer is in what psychologists call “top-down processing.” Your brain doesn’t passively record the world; (Nope) it actively interprets it. Incoming visual information is constantly filtered through expectations shaped by experience — and, as this study suggests, by mood. What you perceive as reality is partly constructed by what you anticipate.
Why This Matters in ‘Live’ Art
If music can subtly shape perception, just imagine now its power in a live setting.
“Without music, life would be a mistake.”
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
At our Sketches of Music performances, audiences experience this phenomenon in real time. As musicians perform and visual artists create simultaneously, sound influences what we see emerging on the canvas — and the evolving artwork reshapes how we hear the music. Mood, expectation, and imagination intertwine.
The result is more than a performance. It is a shared perceptual experience — a reminder that music doesn’t simply accompany life. It transforms how we experience it.
~Jeanne Ricks, CHC