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What can we learn from musical daydreams?

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Speakers/Lectures Academic Music Research Science/Technology

Fri, Apr 10, 2026

12:30 PM – 2 PM EDT (GMT-4)

Music & Theater Building, Room 1004

Fairfax, Virginia, United States

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This talk reports on a series of studies that leverage music listening to study the relationship between perception and imagination. Studies on music perception often presume a listener who is focused on sequences of notes, but auditory processing alone can’t help us understand why people spend on average a quarter of their waking hours listening to music. People spend an even greater proportion of their days immersed in spontaneous thought, wandering from topic to topic without deliberate effort. In recent research, we’ve shown that the spontaneous thought people experience during musical listening consists largely of vivid autobiographical memories and fictional imaginings. People have a sense that their imaginings are idiosyncratic and personal, but analyses of free response descriptions reveal that within a culture, they are in fact broadly shared, even when cued by novel, unfamiliar excerpts. In addition to shared content, these imaginings also unfold with shared temporal structure. Theoretical and methodological advances in studying spontaneous thought during music listening thus offer a unique lens into involuntary mental imaginings that are subjective yet structurally aligned with a stimulus.

Speakers

Elizabeth Margulis's profile photo

Elizabeth Margulis

Acting Chair; Professor of Music

Princeton University

Elizabeth Margulis is Professor and Acting Chair in the Department of Music, with affiliations in Psychology and Neuroscience. She studies the perception and cognition of music. She directs Princeton’s Music Cognition Lab, which brings together students and researchers to ask questions that lie at the intersection of the humanities and the sciences. In particular, she’s interested in the aspects of musical experience that seem most powerful, but hardest to talk about. The lab uses experimental data as a provocative, illuminating way in to some of the most complex, subjective, culturally situated aspects of music, which in turn reveals neglected, broader aspects of human cognition and behavior. 

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