Listening to music modulates visual perception of paintings during binocular rivalry

Music, as a hierarchically organized art form, profoundly influences perception and mood through its rich information and intense emotion. While previous research has demonstrated that music can shape visual perception, its influences on visual awareness in aesthetic scenes remain largely unclear. In a series of five experiments involving 138 participants, we used the binocular rivalry paradigm to investigate how sad or lively Chinese folk music influences the perception of traditional Chinese paintings with varying aesthetic emotion (bleak vs. vivid). Paintings were presented in upright or inverted orientations or replaced by patches. Results revealed that sad music significantly increased both the average dominance duration and the predominance score of bleak paintings. Conversely, lively music with a faster tempo accelerated the switch rate of both paintings and patches. These effects were interdependent, exclusively for meaningful (upright) paintings, and correlated with individual sensitivity to musical reward. Our findings support the hierarchical predictive coding model of binocular rivalry, demonstrating that musical aesthetic emotion exerts top-down modulation, while musical tempo provides bottom-up entrainment, jointly shaping visual awareness of paintings.