How Does Music Shape Imagination?

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When we listen to music we often don’t just focus on its sonic qualities. Hearing a song might bring to mind images of the music video, or the last time we saw a live band perform it. We may remember hearing the song on a road trip with high school friends, and be brought back to the sights, smells, and feelings of that experience. We might simply imagine colored shapes or blobs moving through space, or construct a detailed mental narrative of a cat chasing a mouse.

All of these experiences have been referred to as “music-evoked thoughts,” and recent research has sought to understand why certain thoughts occur in response to certain music. In one study, my colleagues and I compared thoughts evoked by instrumental excerpts of unfamiliar classical, electronic, and pop/rock music (Jakubowski et al., 2024). Importantly, we matched these music excerpts in terms of their emotions across genres so that we had some excerpts from each genre that conveyed happiness, some from each genre that conveyed anger, and so on. This allowed us to compare the independent effects of the genre and emotions of the music on the reported thoughts.

Music-evoked thoughts were very frequent: Overall, listeners reported thoughts 76 percent of the time. However, the occurrence of thoughts varied across genres. Classical and electronic music elicited more thoughts than pop/rock music. This doesn’t necessarily mean pop/rock music genres are mentally unengaging (plus our participants said they prefer those genres in general). Rather, genres like classical and electronic music might provide greater affordances for narrative engagement or visual mental imagery, whereas pop/rock music might invite listeners to engage in different ways, like dancing or singing along.

Along those lines, classical music also elicited more thoughts about the music itself, fictional stories, and media-related memories than the other genres. Electronic music, on the other hand, evoked more abstract visual imagery (such as colors or shapes). Some of these associations may be related to compositional elements. For instance, classical music was often composed specifically with the aim of evoking an imagined story or mental imagery, such as The Four Seasons by Vivaldi.

On the other hand, some of these links are likely related to the contexts with which we associate music. Classical music is often used in movies, which likely explains the higher prevalence of media-related memories reported in response to this music. More broadly, we found strong similarities between the most frequently occurring words in the thought descriptions and responses to a completely different question we asked (to completely different participants) about the contexts in which one would expect to hear this music. For instance, electronic music tended to evoke thoughts about clubbing and video games, pop/rock music evoked thoughts about live gigs and driving, and classical music evoked thoughts about movies, ballets, and weddings.

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These contextual associations may vary notably across different cultures. Supporting this idea, a recent study revealed that fictional stories reported while listening to classical music were highly similar in two groups of young adults in the U.S., but the stories generated by listeners in a rural village in China in response to these same excerpts were significantly different (Margulis et al., 2022). This suggests that even when asked to generate entirely fictional stories, listeners are constrained by their prior associations with music. This speaks to general theories that our memories play a substantial role in shaping imagination (Margulis & Jakubowski, 2024).

Beyond the genre effects we found in our recent study, the emotions of the music had comparatively fewer effects on listeners’ thoughts (Jakubowski et al., 2024). One exception was that more positive-sounding music elicited thought descriptions that contained more positive words. Thus, it seems the emotions of music shape thoughts in a congruent way, but do not seem to directly impact the particular types of thoughts experienced.

Understanding how different music elicits different types and contents of thoughts is important for various practical uses of music. For instance, a therapist might aim to trigger specific types of thoughts via music when working with a client, or an artist might aim to engage a more creative thinking mode by listening to a particular piece of music. Ongoing research in this area seeks to make comparisons across additional styles of music and demographic groups to explore how features of both the music and the listener impact thoughts during music listening.