Sound and Colour: Evaluating Auditory-Visual Tests in Virtual Reality and Traditional Desktop Settings

In this pilot study, we used a balanced A/B testing method to evaluate how an environment - a Virtual Reality (VR) head-mounted display (HMD) versus a traditional desktop - affects the performance of 20 participants on a musical pitch-colour association test. We aimed to discern the influence of testing environments on musical pitch-colour associations. Our findings revealed no significant difference in performance between the VR HMD and the traditional desktop conditions. Previous studies highlight VR's potential, but the results of our investigation - focusing on limited immersive and presence qualities - suggest that working in VR as opposed to a standard desktop environment has no significant influence on musical pitch-colour association test results. This outcome prompts a further investigation into other inherent VR characteristics, such as spatial audio, natural environment simulations, and interactive object manipulation, which could potentially enhance the effectiveness of auditory-visual association tests. This study is the first in a series of studies to explore how VR technologies can be exploited to augment multi-modal testing, with a fully immersive musical pitch-colour association test envisioned.