The prevalence and nature of imagined music in the everyday lives of music students

Abstract

`Musical imagery' is the experience of imagining music in the `mind's ear'. A study was conducted to explore the prevalence and nature of musical imagery for music students in everyday life, using experience-sampling methods (ESM). As a group, music students reported that imagining music was a very frequent form of musical experience. Participants reported individual variation in their imagery experience but also common differences between the strength of imagery for different musical dimensions. For instance, melody and lyrics were rated as being more vivid components of the image than timbre and expression. Another clear pattern was the influence of hearing music on musical imagination, one indicator being that 58 percent of sampled episodes described having heard or performed the music recently as a possible reason for currently imagining it.