I thought I share an interesting paper presented at the International Congress on Acoustics (ICA) that aims to find out if color has an influence on how loud we think the sound that we are hearing is:
Colour-influences on loudness judgements
Daniel Menzel, Norman Haufe, Hugo Fastl
AG Technische Akustik, MMK, Technische Universität München, Germany
I don't know the other two authors but Hugo Fastl has written the definitive book on psychoacoustics so anytime I see his name, I pay attention
.
The paper tests influence of different colors when presented as different objects from lines to sports cars and trains. Here, I will only summarize the test where they used a drawing of a "radio" with different colors and see if it has an impact on loudness judgement. Here are the graphical results:
Fascinating, isn't it? "Hot Pink" (or bright red) is what it says. And dark colors like black bias our thinking that something is quieter, or "darker" as the audiophile parlance goes.
Here is a portion of the summary:
"... in each experiment about one third of the subjects did show shifts
in their loudness judgements which depended on the presented
colours. The relative shifts were in the order of 2 to 9%, with
c1 (“bright red”) and c7 (“bright pink”) often causing an increased
loudness rating, and c17 (“grey”) and c19 (“light green”)
associated mainly with lower loudness ratings."
Made the above red hoping it comes across louder.
Anyway the walk away point is that our other senses, in this case eyes, can influence what we think we hear even though the sound does not change. In this case something as simple as the color.
Colour-influences on loudness judgements
Daniel Menzel, Norman Haufe, Hugo Fastl
AG Technische Akustik, MMK, Technische Universität München, Germany
I don't know the other two authors but Hugo Fastl has written the definitive book on psychoacoustics so anytime I see his name, I pay attention
.The paper tests influence of different colors when presented as different objects from lines to sports cars and trains. Here, I will only summarize the test where they used a drawing of a "radio" with different colors and see if it has an impact on loudness judgement. Here are the graphical results:
Fascinating, isn't it? "Hot Pink" (or bright red) is what it says
. And dark colors like black bias our thinking that something is quieter, or "darker" as the audiophile parlance goes.Here is a portion of the summary:
"... in each experiment about one third of the subjects did show shifts
in their loudness judgements which depended on the presented
colours. The relative shifts were in the order of 2 to 9%, with
c1 (“bright red”) and c7 (“bright pink”) often causing an increased
loudness rating, and c17 (“grey”) and c19 (“light green”)
associated mainly with lower loudness ratings."
Made the above red hoping it comes across louder.
Anyway the walk away point is that our other senses, in this case eyes, can influence what we think we hear even though the sound does not change. In this case something as simple as the color.
