How does music shape imagination?

Part of the Music Research Seminar Series 2025-26

Speaker: Kelly Jakubowski – Durham University

Location: School of Music Lecture Theatre 2

• This will be a hybrid event. The guest speaker will be present with us in the School of Music, and colleagues and other guests are encouraged to join us there. But if you are unable to do so then please consider joining us via Teams.
• No booking is required. Those wishing to attend online should contact series convenor Dr Ellis Jones (e.n.jones@leeds.ac.uk).

When people listen to music they often don’t just focus on its sonic qualities; the music may prompt them to imagine stories and narratives, recall scenes and memories from their pasts, and experience mental images of colours, smells, tastes, and shapes. This ongoing project aims to explore the diversity of types and contents of thoughts evoked by listening to music. To date we have collected data from over 2,500 UK/US adults listening to 30-second instrumental music excerpts from 17 genres (spanning from classical and pop to ambient and metal music). Results of these studies reveal that features of the stimuli (e.g., spectral features, genre, ratings of perceived emotion) and features of the listener (e.g., familiarity and liking of the music, age group) predict both the categories of thoughts reported as well as the semantic similarity (cosine similarity of word embeddings) of thought descriptions. These findings represent a significant step forward in explaining why certain music evokes certain thoughts, with implications for music therapy, creativity research, and consciousness studies. 

Kelly Jakubowski is Professor of Music Psychology at Durham University. Her research interests include memory for music, music-evoked autobiographical memory, musical imagery and imagination, earworms, absolute pitch, musical timing and movement, and cross-cultural music perception. She is co-leader of Durham’s Music Psychology Lab and Co-Director of the Centre for Research into Inner Experience. Kelly is committed to public research dissemination, and her work has been featured in outlets from the New York Times and Washington Post to the Guardian and BBC World Service.