A Study of Student Correlations Between Music and Six Paintings by Klee

Cowles has suggested that there is a correlation between paintings and music.1 His investigation with auditory and visual stimuli indicated that certain sounds might be associated with particular visual patterns. Hevner found a similarity between the moods of various pieces of music she presented to her subjects and the adjectives the subjects used to describe the music.2 Her subjects chose the same adjectives for the same compositions. By varying her experimental conditions, Hevner also found that her subjects were able to apprehend meaning in the music presented, and that music majors understood musical meanings more sharply and with greater ease than did nonmusic majors. Wehner, conducting a study with seven music majors, found that as his subjects listened to various pieces of music they were able to decide correctly which painting of Paul Klee was appropriately associated with which music.3 He concluded that music majors were able to distinguish auditory stimuli that could be associated strongly with visual stimuli. Because Klee was both an accomplished musician and an artist, some of his paintings have been interpreted as gzaphic transcriptions of musical rhythm not only in the abstract sense of rhythmic caesuras, of musicality infused in the pictorial image, but in the