Sonic Visions: How Music Navigates the Visual Pathways of the Mind

In the field of music cognition, mental imagery—that is, quasi-perceptual experience in the absence of the corresponding external sensory input—has mainly been studied with a focus on auditory imagery. Recent research shows, however, that other modalities such as visual mental imagery (i.e., seeing images in one’s mind’s eye) form an integral part of the experience of music listening, too. In this presentation, I will give an overview of new empirical studies on music-induced visual mental imagery, addressing some fundamental questions such as its content, function, relation to emotion, and neurophysiological correlates. The main argument is that music listening is a multimodal phenomenon which navigates other sensory modalities and provides a fruitful model to investigate the routes from perception to imagination.