Seeing the Music

The integration of visual elements with music has become increasingly common in music appreciation contexts. Yet it remains uncertain whether, and if so, how dynamic audiovisual congruence specifically affects aesthetic judgments of music. We conducted two experiments to investigate how dynamic congruence between music and spectrograms influences initial beauty judgments of Western classical piano music, and to identify the underlying mechanisms and boundary conditions of these audiovisual effects. In Experiment 1, sixty participants (30 music majors) evaluated classical piano excerpts accompanied by spectrograms that were either dynamically congruent or incongruent with the acoustic features of the music. Results showed that dynamic congruence significantly enhanced initial beauty judgments, with this effect being equally strong for both music majors and non-majors. In Experiment 2, forty participants evaluated Western classical piano excerpts with different emotional valence (positive vs. negative) accompanied by either congruent or incongruent spectrograms. Results revealed that dynamic congruence enhanced initial beauty judgments more strongly for music with negative emotional valence, and this effect operated through a serial mediation pathway where congruence first improved processing fluency, which then increased pleasantness, ultimately enhancing beauty judgments. Importantly, this mediating process was moderated by perceived congruency, indicating the effect only manifests when participants successfully detect audiovisual correspondence. Collectively, these findings demonstrate that audiovisual dynamic congruence plays an important role in shaping beauty judgments of Western classical piano music through enhanced processing fluency and pleasantness. These results highlighted the benefits of integrating synchronized visual elements to enhance aesthetic appreciation, particularly for music with negative emotional valence.