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The scientific literature sometimes considers music an abstract stimulus, devoid of explicit meaning, and at other times considers it a universal language. Here, individuals in three geographically distinct locations spanning two cultures performed a highly unconstrained task: they provided free-response descriptions of stories they imagined while listening to instrumental music. Tools from natural language processing revealed that listeners provide highly similar stories to the same musical excerpts when they share an underlying culture, but when they do not, the generated stories show limited overlap. These results paint a more complex picture of music’s power: music can generate remarkably similar stories in listeners’ minds, but the degree to which these imagined narratives are shared depends on the degree to which culture is shared across listeners. Thus, music is neither an abstract stimulus nor a universal language but has semantic affordances shaped by culture, requiring more sustained attention from psychology.
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Imaginings from an unfamiliar world: Narrative engagement with a new musical system.
Human imagination is generative and creative yet deeply rooted in culture and familiarity. Recent studies have quantified the effects of culture on stories that are imagined during music listening, but the music used in previous work was always drawn from a tradition familiar to participants from at least one of the cultures. Here we report the first study of imagined stories to music written in a musical system that is novel to participants from each culture, thus allowing for a direct comparison of narratives prompted by the same set of excerpts that is comparably unfamiliar to both groups. Music composed in the Bohlen–Pierce scale was presented to participants from two geographically defined cultures: Boston, United States and Beijing, China. We also examined how individual differences, such as in musicality and sensitivity to musical reward, might affect narrative engagement and semantic content of the imagined stories as measured by tools from natural language processing. Results showed that semantic spaces of music-evoked imaginings differed between Boston and Beijing cohorts. While both cultures were similarly engaged by the story response task, differences emerged in the semantic content of the imagined stories. Boston participants who reported being more absorbed by music wrote more unconventional stories, whereas Beijing participants who reported more emotional responses to music wrote more conventional stories. These results reveal the roles of culture and individual differences in modes of narrative engagement and imagination during music listening. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)
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- PAR ID:
- 10516798
- Publisher / Repository:
- APA
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts
- ISSN:
- 1931-3896
- 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/10.1037/aca0000629
