Seeing Sound, Feeling Music: Crossmodal Correspondences, Audiovisual Emotion, and the Moderating Roles of Expertise, Age, Gender, and STEM Knowledge

Can the shape of a sound wave be visually observed, and can music be emotionally felt? This review synthesizes evidence from crossmodal correspondence research, audiovisual integration studies, and the psychology of music to argue that both questions are best answered through a single theoretical lens: the human perceptual system spontaneously maps auditory dimensions onto visual and spatial dimensions, and these same mappings participate in the generation of musical emotion. We first review the core correspondences — pitch–height, loudness–size, and the bouba/kiki sound–shape effect — documenting their universality, their roots in the physical statistics of the environment, and their neural substrates . We then trace how these correspondences support the deliberate visualization of sound in drawing and gesture paradigms , and review the literature on felt versus perceived musical emotion, including chills and their individual-difference correlates . The audiovisual integration literature shows that congruent visual information reliably amplifies both perceived and felt emotion in music . Finally, we evaluate four candidate moderators of the accuracy with which people see sound and the intensity with which they feel music: musical expertise, age, gender, and STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) knowledge. Musical expertise sharpens both crossmodal mapping accuracy and audiovisual temporal precision ; age follows an inverted-U trajectory for sound–shape association strength ; gender effects are documented but understudied ; and STEM training biases perception bidirectionally, sharpening domain-relevant attention while inducing expert blind spots . We close with an integrated framework and open questions for future research.