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Music listening can evoke a range of extra-musical thoughts, from colors and smells to autobiographical memories and fictional stories. We investigated music-evoked thoughts as an overarching category, to examine how the music’s genre and emotional expression, as well as familiarity with the style and liking of individual excerpts, predicted the occurrence, type, novelty, and valence of thoughts. We selected 24 unfamiliar, instrumental music excerpts evenly distributed across three genres (classical, electronic, pop/rock) and two levels of expressed valence (positive, negative) and arousal (high, low). UK participants (N = 148, Mage = 28.68) heard these 30-second excerpts, described any thoughts that had occurred while listening, and rated various features of the thoughts and music. The occurrence and type of thoughts varied across genres, with classical and electronic excerpts evoking more thoughts than pop/rock excerpts. Classical excerpts evoked more music-related thoughts, fictional stories, and media-related memories, while electronic music evoked more abstract visual images than the other genres. Positively valenced music and more liked excerpts elicited more positive thought content. Liking and familiarity with a style also increased thought occurrence, while familiarity decreased the novelty of thought content. These findings have key implications for understanding how music impacts imagination and creative processes.
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The Physiology of Musical Preference
The dominant research strategy within the field of music perception and cognition has typically involved new data collection and primary analysis techniques. As a result, numerous information-rich yet underexplored datasets exist in publicly accessible online repositories. In this paper we contribute two secondary analysis methodologies to overcome two common challenges in working with previously collected data: lack of participant stimulus ratings and lack of physiological baseline recordings. Specifically, we focus on methodologies that unlock previously unexplored musical preference questions. Preferred music plays important roles in our personal, social, and emotional well-being, and is capable of inducing emotions that result in psychophysiological responses. Therefore, we select the Study Forrest dataset “auditory perception” extension as a case study, which provides physiological and self-report demographics data for participants (N = 20) listening to clips from different musical genres. In Method 1, we quantitatively model self-report genre preferences using the MUSIC five-factor model: a tool recognized for genre-free characterization of musical preferences. In Method 2, we calculate synthetic baselines for each participant, allowing us to compare physiological responses (pulse and respiration) across individuals. With these methods, we uncover average changes in breathing rate as high as 4.8%, which correlate with musical genres in this dataset (p < .001). High-level musical characteristics from the MUSIC model (mellowness and intensity) further reveal a linear breathing rate trend among genres (p < .001). Although no causation can be inferred given the nature of the analysis, the significant results obtained demonstrate the potential for previous datasets to be more productively harnessed for novel research.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2313518
- PAR ID:
- 10506689
- Publisher / Repository:
- UC Press
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Music Perception: An Interdisciplinary Journal
- Volume:
- 40
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 0730-7829
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 395 to 409
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.1525/mp.2023.40.5.395
