Cross-Modal Integration In Music Perception

A study was conducted to investigate the differences in the extent of visual and vibrotactile influences on auditory judgments and the role of learning in cross-modal integration in music. The results of the study indicate that visual and vibrotactile inputs enhance accuracy for judgments of interval size compared to audio alone. Participants gained enhancements of accuracy from both audio-visual and audio-vibrotactile conditions. Relative gains from vibrotactile exposure are not considering that auditory-vibrotactile associations are both lawful and stem from same environmental signal. Cross-modal parings of auditory and vibrotactile information are relatively unfamiliar to participants. The study also showed that, in ecological settings, lower- and higher-frequency vibrational components are available simultaneously, resulting in masking of higher-frequency components.