ShalomNewYork.com

“Here we go again: A paper published by two researchers at the University of London claims to prove that music affects our responses to visual images. In “Crossmodal Transfer of Emotion by Music,” Joydeep Bhattacharya and Nidhya Logeswaran report that people who look at a picture of a human face can be influenced in how they evaluate the emotion shown by that face if they listen to a 15-second snippet of music before viewing it. If the music is “happy,” then the subject is more likely to judge the facial expression shown in the picture as happy—even if the expression is neutral—and vice versa. Forgive me for rolling my eyes, but I’ve been down this road a few million times, and I still don’t know where it leads. Only the tone-deaf doubt the power of music, though some feel it more strongly than others.” more@WSJ.com