Narratives imagined in response to instrumental music reveal culture-bounded intersubjectivity.

The scientific literature sometimes considers music an abstract stimulus, devoid of explicit meaning, and at other times considers it a universal language. Here, individuals in three geographically distinct locations spanning two cultures performed a highly unconstrained task: they provided free-response descriptions of stories they imagined while listening to instrumental music. Tools from natural language processing revealed that listeners provide highly similar stories to the same musical excerpts when they share an underlying culture, but when they do not, the generated stories show limited overlap. These results paint a more complex picture of music's power: music can generate remarkably similar stories in listeners' minds, but the degree to which these imagined narratives are shared depends on the degree to which culture is shared across listeners. Thus, music is neither an abstract stimulus nor a universal language but has semantic affordances shaped by culture, requiring more sustained attention from psychology.

Spontaneous mental replay of music improves memory for musical sequence knowledge.

Involuntary musical imagery (INMI; more commonly known as "earworms" or having a song "stuck in your head") is a common musical phenomenon and one of the most salient examples of spontaneous cognition. Despite the ubiquitous nature of INMI in the general population, functional roles of INMI remain to be fully established and characterized. Findings that spontaneous reactivation of mental representations aids in memory consolidation raise the possibility that INMI also serves in this capacity. In three experiments, we manipulated the probability of experiencing INMI for novel music loops by first exposing participants to these loops during tasks that varied in attentional and sensorimotor demands. We measured INMI for loops and the quality of individual loop memories using different tasks both immediately following exposure and at a delay of 1 week. Across experiments, reduced exposure to music had the largest effect on INMI and loop memory. In Experiments 1 and 2, music encoding was resilient to manipulations of attentional focus; however, in Experiment 3, engaging sequence learning processes with an unrelated task during music exposure reduced the subsequent accuracy of loop memories and the likelihood of experiencing INMI. In each experiment, the amount of INMI experienced for a loop across the delay period predicted improvements in the accuracy of a loop memory over time. We thus provide evidence for a memory-consolidation role for INMI, in which the spontaneous replay of recently encoded music is related to the quality of music encoding and predicts changes in music memory over time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Spontaneous mental replay of music improves memory for incidentally associated event knowledge.

Why is music effective at evoking memories from one's past? Familiar music is a potent cue that can trigger, often involuntarily, the recollection of associated autobiographical memories. The mechanisms by which associations between music and nonmusical knowledge initially form and consolidate into long-term memory have not been elucidated. In three experiments, we linked two common musical phenomena, involuntary musical imagery (INMI; commonly called "earworms") and music-evoked remembering, in testing the hypothesis that such imagery aids in the consolidation of memory for events with which music becomes associated. We manipulated the probability of experiencing INMI for novel music loops by first exposing participants to these loops during tasks that varied in attentional and sensorimotor demands. Then, 1 week later, these loops served as soundtracks for unfamiliar movies. Immediately after movie viewing, and at subsequent delays of 1-4 weeks, participants recalled movie details, using the soundtracks as retrieval cues. The amount of INMI across the delay periods predicted both the accuracy of the memory for the music itself and the amount of recalled movie knowledge at the temporal granularity of the 30-s epochs during which individual loops played. We conclude that the replay of musical sequence memories during episodes of INMI serves as a consolidation mechanism both for the music and for associated episodic information. We thus demonstrate that spontaneous internally cued memory reactivation is a naturally occurring memory process that improves retention of real-world event knowledge. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).