Investigation of Multisensory Harmonic Priming: Audiovisual Integration in Chord Perception

Although typically thought of as a unimodal phenomenon, musical experience is fundamentally multisensory. The current study examined such multisensory influences by exploring the impact of visual information on the processing of higher-order musical structure, within the context of harmonic expectancy formation. Specifically, musically trained participants experienced four different priming events, including an auditory chord prime, a visual chord prime, an auditory-visual note/chord prime, and an auditory note prime, and discriminated harmonically related versus unrelated in-tune and out-of-tune target chords. Analyses of reactions and error rates revealed typical harmonic priming effects (i.e., faster reaction times and lower error rates to related than unrelated targets for in-tune chords) for auditory chord and auditory-visual note/chord primes, but no differences for visual chord and auditory note primes. The finding that auditory-visual note/chord primes led to priming indicates that visual information can induce auditory expectancies when supported by auditory cue information. These results are discussed within the context of models of tonal relations, as well as in relation to theories of multisensory processing in general.