Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Musical key is associated with distinctive sensory qualities, yet it remains unclear whether such impressions reflect pitch height alone or notation-related key representations beyond the major--minor distinction. This study tested whether sharp and flat keys evoke different sensory impressions and whether these differences are reflected in performance. In Experiment~1, musicians rated brightness, warmth, and shape while listening to Mozart excerpts transposed across all keys and into enharmonic key pairs. Sharp-labeled keys were rated as brighter, colder, and more pointed than flat-labeled keys, even when pitch content was identical. In Experiment~2, violinists performed excerpts in the same key conditions, and acoustic features were analyzed. No reliable sharp--flat differences were observed in the acoustic measures examined here. These findings suggest that sharp--flat distinctions can shape explicit perceptual judgments beyond pitch height without necessarily producing corresponding differences in measured performance acoustics.