We see what we hear: dissonant music engages early visual processing.

The neuroscientific examination of music processing in audiovisual contexts offers a valuable framework to assess how auditory information influences the emotional encoding of visual information. Using fMRI during naturalistic film viewing, we investigated the neural mechanisms underlying the effect of music on valence inferences during mental state attribution. Thirty-eight participants watched the same short-film accompanied by systematically controlled consonant or dissonant music. Subjects were instructed to think about the intentions of the main character. The results revealed that increasing levels of dissonance led to more negatively-valenced inferences, displaying the profound emotional impact of musical dissonance. Crucially, at the neuroscientific level and despite music being the sole manipulation, dissonance evoked the response of the primary visual cortex response (V1). Functional/effective connectivity analysis showed a stronger coupling between the auditory ventral stream (AVS) and V1 in response to tonal dissonance, and demonstrated the modulation of early visual processing via top-down feedback inputs from the AVS to V1. These V1 signal changes indicate the influence of high-level contextual representations associated with tonal dissonance on early visual cortices, serving to facilitate the emotional interpretation of visual information. The findings substantiate the critical role of audio-visual integration in shaping higher-order functions such as social cognition.