Musical imaginings as a pathway to understanding intersubjectivity in spontaneous thought

This talk reports on a series of studies that leverage music listening to study the relationship between perception and imagination. Studies on music perception often presume a listener who is focused on sequences of notes, but auditory processing alone can’t help us understand why people spend on average a quarter of their waking hours listening to music. People spend an even greater proportion of their days immersed in spontaneous thought, wandering from topic to topic without deliberate effort. In recent research, we’ve shown that the spontaneous thought people experience during musical listening consists largely of vivid autobiographical memories and fictional imaginings. People have a sense that their imaginings are idiosyncratic and personal, but analyses of free response descriptions reveal that within a culture, they are in fact broadly shared, even when cued by novel, unfamiliar excerpts. In addition to shared content, these imaginings also unfold with shared temporal structure. Theoretical and methodological advances in studying spontaneous thought during music listening thus offer a unique lens into involuntary mental imaginings that are subjective yet structurally aligned with a stimulus.