Music, figures and words, Oh my!: the influences of music on stick figures and word perception: an audiovisual Gestalt investigation

Abstract

Everyday we encounter sights and sounds paired together. This experiment investigates one type of audiovisual integration: that of biological motion and musical phrases. The current proposal hypothesizes that brief musical phrases can influence the implied action motion of a static human form stick figure and body action terms through different melodies and rhythms. The results are discussed in terms of Lipscomb and Kendall's (1994) model of audiovisual perception, Mayer and Sims' (1994) dual coding of multimedia learning, as well as understanding the mechanisms for when and how we process and interpret the integration of music and simple pictorial representations. A proposal of audiovisual Gestalt principles is discussed.