Color as an Affective Cue in Musical Improvisation

This study examined the effects of projected colored light on college students’ perceived emotional expression during musical improvisation. Twenty undergraduate and graduate music students at a large research university participated in a repeated-measures experiment in which they improvised under five color conditions: standard overhead lighting, red, yellow, green, and blue. Participants rated the emotional qualities and creativity they perceived in their performances after each improvisation, and three musically trained raters independently evaluated the same measures in anonymized recordings. Significant differences emerged across color conditions for participant-reported measures of valence and arousal, including positive emotion, negative emotion, energy, and tension, indicating that color functioned as a meaningful affective stimulus during performance. Participants and raters showed similar patterns in emotion-cluster selections under red and blue lighting. It should be noted that this comparison reflects modal group-level responses rather than agreement between individual rater–performer pairs on the same recordings. Repeated-measures analyses found no significant differences in overall creativity ratings across color conditions for either participants or raters. However, participants’ self-reported confidence in improvising was positively correlated with raters’ creativity ratings across all color conditions, with the strongest relationships emerging under colored-light conditions. These findings suggest that projected colored light may influence musicians’ perceived emotional expression during improvisation without substantially altering perceptions of creativity. Implications for music education and future research on environmental influences in musical performance are discussed.