Music in mind? An experience sampling study of what and when, towards an understanding of why.

Abstract

Imagining music in the course of everyday life is commonplace, and recent studies have begun to reveal what we imagine, and to ask why. However, research methods that rely on retrospective reports are not sensitive to the transience of imagined musical experience. In 2007, Bailes used experience sampling methods instead, to understand the prevalence and nature of imagined music episodes among music students. The current study extends this research to a larger and broader sample of the general public (N ϭ 47, with 1,415 episodes), to determine what people imagine, when, and why. Respondents were contacted by SMS 6 times a day, for the period of a week. On contact, they filled out an experience sampling form surveying current location, activity, mood, and details of any musical experience, heard or imagined. Open questions elicited reasons for imagining particular music, and probed the nature of the experience. Specific hypotheses linking musical imagery to thought incursions and mood regulation were tested. A positive relationship between the frequency of imagining music and transliminality was found, as well as mood congruence between heard and imagined music episodes. Suggestions are made for further research into the potential influence of chronobiology, arousal, and attention on everyday musical imagery.

Understanding inner music: A dimensional approach to musical imagery.

“…Liikkanen (2011) found that while half of respondents did report their inner music to be repetitive, over one-third reported experiencing non-repetitive inner music. Other research has also found reports of both repetitive and non-repetitive inner music (Bailes, 2007(Bailes, , 2015Halpern & Bartlett, 2011).…”

“…Even in research that does not explicitly use terms such as involuntary musical imagery or earworms, the questions reflect the narrow conceptualization of inner music that restricts it to involuntary forms (e.g., Liikkanen, 2008Liikkanen, , 2011. Notably, a few researchers do not use this language (e.g., Bailes, 2006Bailes, , 2007Bailes, , 2015Beaty et al, 2013) and have suggested that it is needlessly limiting (Bailes, 2015).…”

“…Furthermore, a third component of involuntary musical imagery is its repetitiveness. This component does have more empirical support (e.g., Bailes, 2007Bailes, , 2015Liikkanen, 2011), but not all inner music is repetitive (Bailes, 2007). Research has largely ignored mental rehearsal and mental composition-prime examples of nonrepetitive musical imagery-so the full breadth of these experiences has yet to be explored.…”

“…Musicians deliberately use inner music in preparation for upcoming performances (Bailes, 2006;Gregg, Clark, & Hall, 2008) as well as during their performances through anticipating upcoming musical lines (Keller, 2012;Saintilan, 2015). Inner music is also important in musical composition (Bailes, 2007(Bailes, , 2015Beaty et al, 2013). Initiation, however, has not been examined in non-musician samples.…”

Dissecting an earworm: Melodic features and song popularity predict involuntary musical imagery.

“…Lab-based studies have found that the song that has been heard aloud most recently is more likely to become INMI than a song heard less recently (Hyman et al, 2013;Liikkanen, 2012b), and recent exposure to a tune is generally the most frequently reported trigger of INMI experiences in diary and questionnaire studies (Bailes, 2015;Floridou & Müllensiefen, 2015;Hemming, 2009;Jakubowski, Farrugia, Halpern, Sankarpandi, & Stewart, 2015;. Familiarity can also increase the likelihood that a song will become INMI.…”