Music Listening and the Imagination

People listening to music over headphones tend not to focus on sonic elements like notes, timbres, or rhythms; instead, attention shifts to an associated set of multisensory imaginings, including visual imagery, autobiographical memories, or kinesthetic sensations. These imaginative responses might seem like arbitrary episodes of mind wandering, but tools from Natural Language Processing reveal that individual excerpts elicit broadly shared imaginings. Yet this intersubjectivity fails to convey across cultural boundaries, raising questions about music’s capacity not just to connect, but also to divide. Using a variety of methods, this paper explores the cultural and sonic experiences that shape imaginative responses to music.