Music Speaks: Narrative Imagination Across Music and Speech

Abstract

Storytelling and narratives are an integral part of the human experience. Music is capable of eliciting emotionally rich, imagined narratives that show robust within-culture similarity from engaged listeners (Margulis et al., 2022), yet much remains unknown regarding the underlying cognitive processes that make this possible, as well as how music-cued narrative imagination differs from narrative imagination cued by explicit verbal storytelling. This experiment seeks to address these knowledge gaps by using fMRI to compare the neurobehavioral characteristics of spoken and musical narrative perception and recall. The data are being analyzed using methods adopted from Chen et al. (2017), with an emphasis on computing neural pattern similarity between imagination and report of narratives, and on calculating intersubject correlations (ISCs) within the spoken and musical conditions. Music was found to be as narratively engaging as speech, and evidence of shared neural structure for narrative generation was found across participants for the perception of musical and spoken stimuli and during the report of musically-cued narratives. These results add to the existing literature on imaginative processes, storytelling, and meaning-making in music, with downstream applications in diverse fields such as healthcare and education.