Because consumers often touch products in retail environments while being exposed to

music, this research examines whether, why, and how music affects their haptic softness

perceptions. We clarify the construct of music softness and show that soft rather than hard

music increases consumers’ haptic softness perceptions due to shared linguistic terms for

describing softness of both music and textures. We provide evidence for a serial mediation

underlying these semantically mediated cross-modal correspondences. Specifically, we show

that soft rather than hard music leads to more associations with music softness, which

translate to more associations with haptic softness, which in turn increase haptic softness

perceptions. We demonstrate that the effect of music on haptic softness perceptions occurs

regardless of song lyrics and that the effect of music is attenuated when cognitive resources

are occupied by cognitive load. Moreover, we show that haptic softness perceptions mediate

the effect of music on product evaluations.