Have you ever felt like music keeps you company? Does music truly offer companionship or is it simply a figure of speech?
A new study led by Dr Steffen A. Herff , cognitive neuroscientist at Sydney, Music, Mind and Body Lab at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music , has shown for the first time empirically that music can indeed keep you company by facilitating imagined social interactions.
"Music appears to act as a catalyst for social imagination," Dr Herff said. "Even without words or voices, it can trigger thoughts of connection, warmth and companionship."
Dr Steffen A. Herff at Sydney Conservatorium of Music. Photo credit: Stefanie Zingsheim/University of Sydney
Music keeps you company
"Whether we're celebrating or grieving, music is something we can turn to," Dr Herff said. "This study shows that beyond shaping our emotions, music can also shape our thoughts and imagination, highlighting that music can indeed be good company."
Dr Herff said the findings offer new insight into how music can shape higher order cognitive processes like imagination. The team hopes that the finding may help develop low-cost, easily accessible ways of systematically using music to alleviate feelings of loneliness, especially in times of isolation such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and complement existing recreational, artistic and professional usages of imagination.
"We observed compelling support that music can systematically strengthen and shape mental imagery and induce social themes into imagination. That is a very powerful thing," Dr Herff said. "It has great implications for our understanding of music, understanding of imagination, but also carries practical implications for cognitive behavioural therapies that use mental imagery techniques."
For example, music could be used to enhance clinical therapeutic practices that rely on mental imagery, such as exposure therapy for specific phobias or guided visualisation, such as those used in therapy for PTSD.
The study has just published in Scientific Reports .
Dr Herff is a University of Sydney Horizon Research Fellow , ARC DECRA Fellow and leader of the Sydney, Music, Mind and Body Lab at Sydney Conservatorium of Music.
Can music help shape your thoughts?
Dr Herff and his team of researchers set out to examine if there is an empirically observable effect of music on social thought.
Over four years, they conducted a large-scale study, which involved 600 participants around the world to understand how music can shape imagination.
Participants were asked to close their eyes and imagine journeys towards topographical landmarks, such as a mountain. They did this either in silence or while listening to music. After each imagined journey, they provided responses and detailed accounts of what they imagined.
The researchers used computational models to identify common themes in these descriptions and found that music consistently inspired thoughts of social connection such as spending time with others.
This effect appeared across different songs and even when lyrics or vocals were removed, showing that the feeling of companionship came from the music itself, not just the words. The team also used Generative AI to create visual representations of what people imagined. Such representations are very useful as they allow us to do follow-up studies.
Six hundred participants imagined journeys and shared details through written responses. Source: Scientific Reports
The study found that compared to silence, when participants listened to music, their imaginations sparked and they described vivid imaginary social scenes, such as dancing and laughing with other people.
The study deliberately used folk music (from Italy, Spain and Sweden) due to its strong history of social interaction and its perceived ability to induce social thoughts. Participants listened with and without the lyrics and found the voice was not a prerequisite - the music alone increased social imagination.
The researchers emphasise the need to explore other musical genres and cultural contexts - in particular non-Western genres - to deepen understanding of mental imagery and open more, diverse, and better tailored ways of supporting recreational and clinical use of mental imagery techniques.
The publicly available dataset collected by the team now includes over 4,000 imagined journeys, complete with sentiment ratings, topic weights, and visual representations.
In a second experiment, a new set of participants were able to look at the AI-generated images and identify which ones were inspired by music or not - but only when they did the task listening to music themselves.
"This tells us that there is a 'theory of mind' when it comes to music-evoked mental imagery," said Dr Herff. "That is, people can imagine, what others might be imagining whilst listening to music, which is fascinating."
