A small UK study has found that musical keys shape our sense of beauty and sublimity, with major keys linked to beauty and minor keys to sublimity. When listeners experience music alongside images, visual elements tend to dominate the overall aesthetic impression. The findings appear in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.
Philosophers have long separated beauty and sublimity, with beauty typically tied to harmony, order and pleasure, and sublimity to awe, grandeur and sometimes ambiguity or fear. In the eighteenth century, thinkers such as Burke argued that the sublime stems from feelings of awe and terror, while beauty arises from love and affection. Modern psychology has traditionally concentrated on visual art, with music receiving comparatively less experimental attention.
Researchers from University College London set out to test whether these categories apply to auditory experience and to measure what happens when sound and image are experienced together. The team aimed to pinpoint which musical features trigger beauty versus sublimity and how audio-visual media interact.
Lead author Hur, who is also affiliated with the University of the Arts London, sought to identify the specific musical features that evoke beauty as opposed to sublimity. The researchers used a controlled design to isolate musical characteristics and assess cross-sensory effects.
Musicologists often describe sublime music as featuring escalating dissonance, rapid transitions and emotional ambiguity, while beautiful music is portrayed as flowing, elegant and harmonious. The study frames these terms within a measurable experimental context.
The experiment involved 39 university students who sat in a darkened room and evaluated stimuli on a grid measuring sublimity and beauty simultaneously.
In the first stage, participants viewed 18 photographs projected onto a wall. Images were chosen to cover a wide range of emotional triggers, from peaceful meadows representing high beauty to erupting volcanoes representing high sublimity.
The image ratings served to confirm established ideas about visual aesthetics and provided a baseline for subsequent tests.
Next, participants listened to 36 brief classical piano excerpts. The pieces spanned three stylistic periods—Baroque, Romantic and Modernist—and featured solo piano to control for variables such as lyrics and timbre.
The excerpts varied by musical key, including major, minor and atonal structures, and by tempo, categorised as slow or fast. The researchers treated the key as the primary driver of emotional response.
The results showed that major-key passages were rated as highly beautiful, while minor-key pieces were strongly associated with sublimity. Tempo exerted a smaller influence, with faster music nudging sublimity slightly but not affecting beauty. Atonal works by Schoenberg scored relatively low on both measures.
The final stage combined media types, with participants experiencing random pairings of a photograph and a musical excerpt. They then rated the mixed audiovisual experience on the same sublimity and beauty scales.
In today’s media-saturated world, where soundtracks accompany films and video games alike, the study notes that the visual element often dominates. The sublimity of a photograph influenced the final sublimity rating more than twice as strongly as the accompanying music did, and the beauty of the photograph influenced the final beauty rating almost three times as strongly as the music did.
The researchers also observed a clear division in how these judgments form. The sublimity of a mixed pairing was driven exclusively by the sublimity of its individual visual and musical components, not by their beauty. Conversely, the beauty of a mixed pairing was predicted only by the beauty of the separate parts, not by their sublimity.
Limitations acknowledged by the authors include the relatively small and homogenous participant pool—mostly female university students in the United Kingdom. The Western cultural framework underpinning the stimuli may limit generalisability beyond similar settings. The fixed sequence of the experiment could have influenced outcomes, particularly since the mixed audiovisual pairings always came last; randomising presentation order is suggested for future work.
The study is titled “Cathedrals of Sound: Predictors of the Sublime and the Beautiful in Music, Images, and Music With Images” and was authored by Young-Jin Hur, Radvile Medeisyte and I. Chris McManus.
