Music and Mental Imagery: Editorial

Who doesn’t know the feeling of a tune stuck in one's mind, replaying over and over, even without any external music playing? Those (sometimes a bit annoying) experiences of so-called earworms—formally referred to as involuntary musical imagery—are not only very common in the general population, but often one of music researchers’ first associations with the topic of music and mental imagery. However, the ways in which music and mental imagery are deeply intertwined in our daily lives are much more varied and go far beyond earworms. In the realm of auditory mental imagery, we may use voluntary musical imagery to recall and hear in our mind a tune of a favorite song or a piece of music heard recently. Or we imagine how a piece of music would sound if played live by our favorite band or orchestra. For musicians, voluntary musical imagery plays a particularly important role, as performers mentally practice a piece by imagining the sound of their instrument and the notes they need to play; and composers may utilize musical imagery to conjure up new worlds of sound before attempting to capture them in notation. Besides the auditory domain, the visual, kinesthetic, and tactile domains, too, are integral parts of music-related mental imagery. Listening to music often evokes visual mental imagery such as visualizing landscapes, sceneries, or stories in one's mind's eye, or recalling the visual (and auditory) experience of a concert one attended. Performers may visualize a score or imagine hand and finger movements on their instruments, both visually and kinesthetically, to prepare for a performance. Tactile mental imagery, for example, can occur when a pianist mentally feels the texture and resistance of the keys under their fingers while practicing a piece in their mind. There are also a range of everyday functional uses of music and mental imagery, for instance, to imagine how we will feel when we hear a favorite song or a new release from a beloved artist; or to enhance our mood by using the memory of a certain song to evoke a specific mood, such as feeling uplifted by remembering an upbeat tune. Lastly, we may imagine tunes in our mind to make everyday tasks such as cooking or cleaning more enjoyable or to relieve stress in tense and demanding situations. Thus music and mental imagery can be used in our daily lives to enhance experiences, aid in preparation and practice, and provide emotional and cognitive benefits.

Mental imagery has been at the center of an extensive research program in the cognitive sciences and philosophy since the 1970s (Kosslyn et al., 2006) and has provided basic knowledge for many applied areas such as sports (Cumming & Eaves, 2018), music education (Clark et al., 2011), and cognitive behavior therapy (Blackwell, 2021; Holmes et al., 2007). Some recent discoveries of people unable to form visual and auditory mental images—conditions coined aphantasia (Zeman et al., 2015) and anauralia (Hinwar & Lambert, 2021), respectively—have led to a renewed focus on mental imagery and its underlying (quasi-)perceptual processes, including an attempt to reconsider well-known psychological phenomena such as dreaming, episodic memory, phantom perception, or synesthesia as forms of mental imagery (Nanay, 2018, 2020, 2023).

Given a bias towards visual mental imagery in the cognitive sciences and philosophy, music researchers are in a unique position not only to shed further light on auditory and musical imagery, but on other modalities (visual, kinesthetic, and tactile in particular) that can be evoked during musical activities. The different strands of music-related mental imagery research which have emerged in the past few years are brought together and critically discussed in the edited volume Music and mental imagery by Küssner et al. (2022). The aim of this Special Collection is to continue this thread and help unlock the full potential of this theme for future music research. The 11 articles featured in this collection build on emerging and more established discourses of music and mental imagery, encompassing the following central topics: cross-cultural approaches; atypical mental imagery; music pedagogy and neural correlates in musicians; clinical applications; and, of course, earworms.

Cross-Cultural Approaches

Cross-cultural studies in the field of music and science are on the rise (again), and researchers have recently developed guidelines and recommendations for best practice to decolonize research agendas and avoid pitfalls of the past (Jacoby et al., 2020; Sauvé et al., 2023; Savage et al., 2023). Such carefully devised studies can shed new light on mental imagery by revealing how different cultural backgrounds influence the way individuals experience and engage with mental images, especially in relation to music (for a reflection on ethics and data from the field regarding musical imagery, see also Athanasopoulos, 2022). For instance, certain cultures may emphasize specific sensory modalities, such as visual or auditory imagery, more strongly than others, providing valuable insights into how mental imagery is shaped by cultural practices, traditions, and environments. By comparing these diverse experiences, researchers can develop a more comprehensive understanding of the universal and culturally specific aspects of mental imagery.

Within our Special Collection, Borgohain et al. (2023) provide a fresh angle on cross-cultural studies, as they take Indian classical music (and its associated visual mental imagery) as a starting point for a comparison with western (classical) music—rather than the other way around, as is usually the case. The aim of the study by Borgohain et al. (2023) was to investigate the nature of visual imagery evoked by Hindustani classical music (HCM), specifically in response to calm and sad music, and to compare these with visual imagery evoked by western music and traditional medieval dhyanaslokas (i.e., meditative verses). To achieve this, they recruited 117 participants aged 20–32 years, only 15 of whom had received musical training. Participants listened to eight music clips, pre-rated for their dominant emotions (four sad and four calm), and then described any visual imagery that came to mind, indicating the dominant emotion perceived. Findings revealed that calm music evoked imagery related to nature, musical instruments, relaxation, and spirituality, while sad music evoked imagery of pain, agony, and desolate landscapes, underscoring the significant role of emotions in influencing the content of visual imagery. Comparisons with western music revealed both similarities and cultural differences: themes such as nature and various aspects of a musical performance were common across cultures, but specific subthemes varied, reflecting cultural differences. The study also highlights the role of autobiographical memories in shaping visual imagery, suggesting the crucial role played by personal experiences. By contributing to the understanding of cross-cultural and historical aspects of music-evoked visual imagery, Borgohain et al. (2023) offer insights into the shared and distinct mechanisms of emotional representation through music, making this research a valuable addition to the expanding discourse on music-induced thoughts and imaginings (Antović et al., 2023; Dahl et al., 2023; Hashim et al., 2023; Jakubowski et al., 2024; Margulis et al., 2022; Margulis & McAuley, 2022; Taruffi & Küssner, 2019).

Atypical Mental Imagery

Just as cross-cultural comparisons have gained renewed popularity among music researchers, the study of individuals with special imagery (in)abilities is steadily growing in both research and public interest, possibly sparked by the (re-)discovery of congenital aphantasia (Zeman et al., 2015), i.e., the inborn inability to form visual imagery. While the neural and perceptual bases of visual imagery ranging from aphantasia to hyperphantasia (Milton et al., 2021) are studied in the cognitive sciences, music researchers tap into this emerging field by investigating how musical activities and skills are intertwined with special imagery (in)abilities.

To that end, Hashim et al. (2024b) explored the emotional experiences of individuals with aphantasia in the context of music listening. They compared the experiences of 51 aphantasics and 51 controls while listening to three film music excerpts. Aphantasics reported lower levels of visual imagery and emotional intensity than controls, though both groups expressed similar enjoyment of the music. In a follow-up phase, they examined emotion recognition and everyday music engagement in 29 aphantasics and 29 controls, finding no differences in emotion discrimination ability but lower instances of reminiscence and episodic memories in aphantasics. The results from this study indicate that the absence of visual imagery in aphantasics leads to reduced emotional responses to music, supporting the idea that visual imagery plays a role in enhancing emotional experiences. Taken together, these insights shed light on the relationship between visual imagery, emotion, and music, and emphasize that while aphantasia dampens certain emotional experiences, it does not entirely hinder musical enjoyment and reward. As research into aphantasia is a steadily evolving field, Hashim and colleagues’ study provides a timely and novel examination of this condition in relation to music listening.

A similar picture emerges for research into synesthesia—a perceptual condition where the stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to an automatic, involuntary experience in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. Considering synesthesia as a form of multimodal mental imagery (Nanay, 2020) offers new explanatory perspectives on a condition which has attracted lots of research interest in the past 50 years (Simner & Hubbard, 2013). In connection with music, for instance, it raises the question of whether sound-colour synesthesia and music-induced mental imagery are in fact two sides of the same coin (Küssner & Orlandatou, 2022). This new perspective of linking synesthesia and mental imagery also opens up pathways for music researchers to study a phenomenon—synesthesia—that is quite common in musicians (and other artists, for that matter, see Cytowic, 2002). It is along this novel strand of research that Glasser (2023) offers new insights into the relationship between music-related synesthesia and mental imagery. Glasser conducted a semi-structured interview study with a sample of 18 synesthete-musicians, who each reported experiencing at least one form of music-related synesthesia (with note-colour and key- or tonality-colour associations being the most common types). Results revealed a heightened vividness of auditory imagery, including the ability to control the tempo, dynamics, and intensity of the musicians’ auditory imagery, as well as the generation of multimodal mental imagery without the need for actual sensory input. Perhaps the most intriguing finding was the presence of complex visual imagery in the accounts of the synesthete-musicians, which challenges the prevailing assumption that synesthetic percepts are generic and simple in nature. Interestingly, Glasser's study points to the benefits of examining specifically music-related types of synesthesia, highlighting the notion that synesthesia is a multisensory representational system, thus leading to a deeper understanding of the nature of cross-modal associations in general. In summary, this article sets the stage for further exploration in the relatively uncharted territory of music-related synesthesia and mental imagery, signaling a nascent but promising field of study.

Music Pedagogy and Neural Correlates in Musicians

Whether synesthete-musicians are better at implementing mental imagery exercises during rehearsal than non-synesthetes is an open empirical question. The fact is that mental imagery—especially musical and kinesthetic imagery, but also visual imagery (Presicce, 2022)—is widely used in music pedagogy to learn a new piece or prepare for a performance (Clark et al., 2011; Lotze, 2013), or to manage music performance anxiety (Finch & Oakman, 2022). The focus of attention plays a pivotal role in these processes of learning and performing (Hohagen & Immerz, 2024), and is interlinked with experiences of mental imagery ranging from imagining the meaning of the music, to visual images, to emotions and moods, to narratives associated with the music.

The benefits of adopting an external focus of attention for learning and performing movements (i.e., anticipating the desired effect of one's movements) have been widely studied in the field of sports, but much less so in music performance. Williams et al. (2023) carried out an intervention study involving a small sample of conservatoire (natural trumpet) students to examine the effects of external focus on musicians’ learning and performance. The study primarily investigated how utilizing a practice tool designed to foster external focus (i.e., the Audiation Practice Tool or APT) affects the participants’ playing accuracy and self-efficacy. Additionally, the musicians’ subjective experiences, focusing on their feelings of confidence, engagement, satisfaction, and enjoyment, were explored. The APT invites musicians to engage in a detailed and nuanced manner in auditory and kinesthetic activity, while also inspiring them to imagine characters and emotions of their intended musical performance. Practicing with the APT method resulted in overall improved playing accuracy compared to the participants’ regular practice routines. Additionally, there was a non-significant tendency towards better self-efficacy and confidence. Participants also described the external focus training provided by APT as both engaging and enjoyable. While the study by Williams et al. (2023) emphasizes the importance of an external focus in enhancing musical performance and learning, recent research is also delving into the neural mechanisms underlying such cognitive processes.

In this regard, Pérez-Acosta et al. (2024) conducted an EEG study with a group of 12 musicians to identify modality-independent neural underpinnings of mental imagery and their relation to basic cognitive processes such as attention and memory. The musicians were asked to listen to short musical excerpts and view a couple of visual stimuli, and then to imagine these experimental stimuli. Since musicians are well-trained in imagining both the musical sound of a performance and visual aspects of a performance (e.g., hand position on an instrument or musical scores) they represent a suitable sample for the purpose of Pérez-Acosta and colleagues’ study. However, just as musical performances are inherently multimodal, so were their participants’ imaginings, particularly in the visual imagery condition, which made it difficult to identify the sought-after modality-independent neural activations. This issue aside, the authors were able to replicate well-known findings such as an increase of alpha band power in occipital and parietal areas during the imagery conditions and also demonstrated a widespread increase of beta activity during the visual imagery tasks, adding to the growing literature on music-related mental imagery studies investigating EEG power bands (Fachner et al., 2019; Hashim, Küssner et al., 2024). Their study also identified important issues when testing musicians in imagery-based EEG investigations and may pave the way for integrating neurofeedback into future music-pedagogical tools.

Clinical Applications

Both neurofeedback and mental imagery are firmly established in clinical applications, with a steadily increasing pool of applications utilizing music listening and making (Loui, 2020; Sihvonen et al., 2017). Aiming to contribute to mental imagery as a clinical tool to address mood and anxiety disorders, Herff et al. (2022) investigated the effect of music and eye closure on a goal-directed mental imagery task. Participants watched a short video of a cartoon figure that sets out to reach a landmark only barely visible in the distance. When the video stopped, the participants’ task was to imagine the continuation of the journey until the landmark is reached. This task was either accompanied by background music or silence, and performed either with eyes open or closed. Previous evidence has shown that both music and eye closure can facilitate the vividness of the mental imagery during goal-directed tasks, but the crucial question is to what extent their effects interact and what implications arise for therapeutic interventions. Herff and colleagues showed that eye closure led to more reported vividness in both the silence and music condition, but that this effect was stronger in the music condition. This significant interaction between music and eye closure is not only an important finding for basic research in this area, but is directly translated into recommendations for clinical practice by Herff et al. (2022). They suggest that music combined with eye closure can be used to enhance vividness, duration, and psychological distance for therapeutic purposes, while silence and visual distractions can help reduce emotional and motivational impact when needed. As such this study is an important step towards more fine-tuned therapeutic tools that use music and mental imagery to address affective disorders.

Another clinical field where music and mental imagery is beneficial is Parkinson's. People with Parkinson's (PwP) benefit from the use of auditory cues to initiate and execute movements. For instance, the clicks of a metronome can facilitate their gait. Since external auditory or musical stimuli are not always readily available, researchers are increasingly focusing on PwP's use of mental imagery to improve quality of life. With an online survey, Poliakoff et al. (2023) explored the potential of two types of mental imagery—motor imagery and auditory (including musical) imagery— in a sample of nearly 200 PwP (aged between 20 and 88 years) at various disease stages. Motor imagery was further divided into visual motor imagery (i.e., mentally visualizing body movements) and kinesthetic motor imagery (i.e., a feeling of movement). The authors’ main aims were (a) to find out how vividly PwP experience music-induced motor imagery and whether they actively use this type of imagery in their daily routines, and (b) to measure the vividness of auditory and musical imagery in PwP. The results are very promising. Most PwP, across all disease stages, reported fairly vivid music-induced motor imagery and one fifth were already consciously using it in everyday life. Also auditory and musical imagery were experienced moderately vividly by most PwP and the use already went beyond purely motor-related contexts, suggesting that musical imagery could be harnessed more broadly in PwP addressing issues related to mood and motivation as well. Poliakoff and colleagues’ study provides a glimpse of the manifold possibilities that mental imagery-based interventions could play in tackling symptoms of Parkinson's and prepares the ground for future experimental studies in this field.

Earworms

As mentioned in the introduction of this editorial, research on earworms constitutes a substantial and integral facet of the broader field of music and mental imagery and is therefore—unsurprisingly—well represented in our Special Collection. Given that basic earworm research has produced considerable empirical findings in the past 20 years or so, we are now witnessing a shift to more specialized niches as well as the growing need to theorize. This is reflected in the four articles introduced below: one is concerned with the role of earworms in congenital amusia (Tillmann et al., 2023), another with compositional processes and involuntary musical imagery repetition (Floridou et al., 2023). This diversity is further enriched by the inclusion of two new theoretical accounts of earworms (Arthur, 2023; Schubert, 2023), contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of this fascinating phenomenon.

With its visually suggestive title (“Earworms in the amusic mind?”), Tillmann et al. (2023) set out to investigate musical earworms in individuals with congenital amusia. Using a questionnaire adapted from Halpern and Bartlett (2011), they compared responses from 99 control participants and 41 amusics. Participants reported the frequency, nature, and personal experience of both musical and verbal earworms. The results revealed that almost all participants, regardless of group, experienced musical earworms, though amusics reported them less frequently. Musical earworms were usually familiar music with lyrics, and liked by the participants. In contrast, verbal earworms occurred less frequently but were more common among amusics. Interestingly, the study found that amusics used fewer voluntary strategies to stop earworms, suggesting less stable music memories in this group. Additionally, verbal earworms showed a significant correlation with musical earworms, indicating that they might rely on domain-general processes. The authors suggest that despite impairments in musical memory, individuals with congenital amusia can still experience involuntary musical imagery. This research contributes to our understanding of auditory imagery and the neural mechanisms underlying congenital amusia, emphasizing the complex interaction between implicit processing capacities and musical memory in amusics.

Composing music is inherently associated with musical imagery and has been suggested to be a form of spontaneous musical creativity. Floridou et al. (2023) sought to deepen our understanding of the connection between the phenomenon of novel involuntary musical imagery repetition (IMIR) and creativity within the context of compositional processes. They conducted semi-structured interviews with six composers, exploring the internal and external experiences of novel IMIR. Two descriptive models emerged from a Grounded Theory analysis: the first model indicated that intra-musical features of novel IMIR were described in terms of musical, technical, and linguistic dimensions, and that repetition within novel IMIR was related to functional outcomes associated with experience. The occurrence of novel IMIR was more likely when individuals were in specific mental and physical states (such as low attention states and repetitive movement) and was associated with positive emotional valence and a sense of familiarity. The second model identified various methods to aid the translation of internal novel IMIR into external musical composition and factors influencing the success of this translation, emphasizing the importance of musical skills and the methods used to capture IMIR in accurately externalizing these musical ideas into compositions. This research advances our understanding of the spontaneous cognitive processes underlying musical creativity and elucidates how internal musical imagery is transformed into external creative outputs, offering us a window into the internal creative world of composers.

Arthur's (2023) theory article offers a compelling and thought provoking take on the mechanisms underlying earworms. The first section of the article is dedicated to reviewing notable recent findings and existing theories on earworms. While recent literature has pointed out an absence of theoretical frameworks explaining the earworm phenomenon, the handful of suggested models and mechanisms that do exist are missing cogent long-range explanations. In the second section, Arthur explores new research directions to understand how earworms originate. She argues that to advance the theoretical framework and subsequently generate a biologically-driven theory for earworms—one that focuses not only on the symptoms but also on a plausible etiology—three significant yet often overlooked questions need to be examined: (1) Why music?; (2) Why are earworms so common?; and (3) What causes the continuous rehearsing of an earworm episode? By unpacking the possible answers and implications of these three questions, Arthur suggests that music's distinct characteristics, along with specific conditions like mind-wandering or stress, and individual predispositions such as neuroticism or anxiety, can align to trigger and sustain an earworm. Moreover, the working memory system might operate automatically under favorable musical circumstances, with the rewarding nature of music alone being enough for our brains to repeatedly engage with those catchy tunes. In summary, this article presents a series of intriguing questions, conjectures, and testable hypotheses for future research, drawing on a blend of informal observations and existing empirical research from various fields, including memory, imagery, and mind-wandering. Such rich material is bound to aid in the development of a robust theoretical understanding of the earworm phenomenon.

Schubert's (2023) conceptual paper is another important theoretical impulse for the study of involuntary musical imagery (INMI) or earworms. He argues that one main issue in this field of study is that INMI is not clearly (enough) defined. His particular focus is on repetition, that is, how and what segments of a song repeat in our minds when we are experiencing an earworm. After an insightful literature review of musical features and structures associated with INMI, he introduces the main theoretical construct of his argument: the spreading activation model (SAM). SAM is characterized by two types of coding (semantic/spatial and temporal) via so-called nodes and links. In temporal coding of musical works, Schubert (2023) argues, large-scale contextual information is needed to keep an overview of the whole piece. If that overview is lost, we may start to repeat musical segments contiguously because our cognitive systems “like” to continue repeating things that have been repeated in the real world. He calls this special type INLACREMI (Involuntary, Limited, and Contiguously Repeating Musical Imagery). Two hypotheses are developed: (1) INLACREMI occurs when the piece of music contains contiguously repeating sections, and (2) the occurrence of INLACREMI is facilitated during states of low environmental focus (i.e., mind-wandering), because attention to large-scale musical structure is diminished and surface level features guide the INMI experience, which is then more likely to turn into INLACREMI. Framed within the SAM, these inspiring new hypotheses now await empirical testing.

Conclusion

As the plurality of topics and themes in this Special Collection shows, the intersection of music and mental imagery opens up fascinating avenues for further research. Whether investigating cross-cultural perspectives, atypical mental imagery, or clinical applications, the potential for new discoveries is significant. By bridging the gap between various disciplines—cognitive science, music education, and therapeutic practices—research in this area can deepen our understanding of both basic cognitive processes and the rich experiences music brings. This vibrant and rapidly evolving field holds great promise, not only for advancing theoretical knowledge but also for producing practical benefits in both applied and clinical settings.