Link to conversation article : theconversation.com/can-music-be...
Link to research article: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

All in all, it seems music can indeed be good company :-). #musicscience

Then, we showed these images to a new group of participants and asked them to guess which ones came from participants' imagination during music and silence. The new sample could the task, but only when also listening to the music, hinting at a 'theory of mind of music-evoked mental imagery'.

We then used Stable Diffusion to visualise the 4200 mental imagery reports we collected, and trained a topic model to generate normative representations of the imagined content. Even in these abstracted representation, the difference is quite noticeable:

The effect was quite strong, and was there regardless of whether listeners spoke the language of the lyrics, and it even showed when the music was purely instrumental.

We used Latent Dirichlet Allocation to investigate the themes imagined. We observed much increased loads of social and adventure themes during music listening. Whereas participants during the silence condition stuck much closer to the task instructions and other contextual introductions.

We asked 600 participants to listen to music and imagine journeys towards landmarks. Music compared to silence increases imagined vividness, emotional sentiment, as well as imagined distance and time travelled.