Cathedrals of sound: Predictors of the sublime and the beautiful in music, images, and music with images

The separate aesthetic responses of sublimity and beauty have been distinguished by philosophers (e.g., Burke, 1759/2008) and explored in recent psychological studies using visual images (e.g., Hur et al., 2022). In these works, sublimity, an experience involving astonishment or grandeur, has been contrasted with beauty, which is often associated with prettiness or cuteness. However, empirical studies of sublimity and beauty in music are rare, as are aesthetic responses to stimuli of mixed visual and musical components. The present article examines two questions. Firstly, what are the musical factors that predict sublimity and beauty in musical stimuli? Specifically, what are the contributions of style (Bach vs. Chopin vs. Schoenberg), mode type (major key vs. minor key vs. atonal), and tempo (slow vs. fast)? Secondly, what are the contributions of the visual and musical components in predicting the sublimity and beauty of mixed visual–musical stimuli? For music, mode type was the predominant predictor, with sublimity predicted by the minor key, and beauty by the major key. In the evaluation of mixed visual–musical stimuli, the influence of the sublimity and beauty of the visual component was up to three times as strong as that of the musical component. There was also judgment-type selectivity; the sublimity levels of visual–musical stimuli were predicted by the sublimity levels of the visual and musical components, but not by the beauty levels of the visual and musical components (and vice versa). While sublimity and beauty may be related aesthetic experiences, the present results demonstrate that sublimity and beauty may also operate through different mechanisms.