Cross-modal masked priming of the tritone paradox.

The tritone paradox is a musical illusion consisting of pairs of octave-ambiguous tones that could be heard as ascending or descending in pitch. This study investigated whether perception of the tritone paradox can be unconsciously influenced by a masked visual prime - specifically, a musical notation. In Experiment 1, participants were first given a "neutral" masked prime (an image of an empty music staff) to assess baseline perception.