It turns out the experience of listening to music is not universal, in terms of what every one of us pictures in our minds, as music plays. It’s more of a cultural thing.
A team of international researchers played 60-second snippets of instrumental music for participants, from three regions, across two continents. They found that listeners in Arkansas and Michigan described very similar stories and often used the same words; while the listeners from Dimen, a small village in rural China, envisioned stories that were similar to each other but very different from those of American listeners.
Study co-leader Princeton’s Elizabeth Margulis sums it up, saying, “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.”
Jam in a little more, here: (EurekAlert!)