ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2022
Narratives imagined in response to instrumental music reveal culture-bounded intersubjectivity.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Short, animated storytelling social contact videos reduce addiction stigma in the UK, USA, and South Africa: a randomised controlled trial of 13,397 participants.EClinicalMedicine · 2026Article
- Music evokes shared neural representations of imagined narratives across sensory modalities.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Is there a "mind" behind the music? Attributing music to AI can suppress narrative meaning-making.Cognitive research: principles and implications · 2026Article
- Article
- Music speaks louder than lyrics: a conceptual priming experiment.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- Characterizing the Large-Scale Structure of Multimodal Semantic Networks.Cognitive science · 2025Article
- Micro-variations in timing and loudness affect music-evoked mental imagery.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Solitary silence and social sounds: music can influence mental imagery, inducing thoughts of social interactions.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- From Game to Concert: Exploratory Listening in 'Stardew Valley: Festival of Seasons' Concert Tour.Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Cross-Cultural Biases of Emotion Perception in Music.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Meaning in Music Framed: The Four 'Eff' Processes (Fit, Affiliation, Facilitation, and Fluency).Behavioral sciences (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Article
- Sequence Generation and Evaluation: A Novel Assessment of Musical Creativity.Creativity research journal · 2024Article
- Bodily maps of musical sensations across cultures.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Dynamic emotional states shape the episodic structure of memory.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Your ears don't change what your eyes like: People can independently report the pleasure of music and images.Journal of experimental psychology. Human perception and performance · 2023Article
- Children infer the behavioral contexts of unfamiliar foreign songs.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2023Article
- Music listening evokes story-like visual imagery with both idiosyncratic and shared content.PloS one · 2023Article
- The Exceptions and the Rules in Global Musical Diversity.Journal of cognition · 2023Article
- Stories in Action.Psychological science in the public interest : a journal of the American Psychological Society · 2022Article
- High-Order Areas and Auditory Cortex Both Represent the High-Level Event Structure of Music.Journal of cognitive neuroscience · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
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.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.