Summary: A large-scale study with 600 participants shows that music can genuinely evoke feelings of companionship by sparking social imagination. When participants listened to folk music, they imagined vivid social scenes such as being with friends, even when lyrics were removed.
Compared with silence, music consistently amplified mental imagery tied to warmth and connection. These results highlight music’s potential as a low-cost tool to reduce loneliness and support mental health therapies.
Key Facts
- Social Imagery: Music evoked vivid scenes of togetherness, even without lyrics.
- Global Study: 600 participants produced over 4,000 imagination reports.
- Therapeutic Promise: Findings may support new mental health interventions.
Source: University of Sydney
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.”
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.
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.”
Funding: This work was supported by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council (ARC) under the Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA, DE220100961) awarded to Dr Steffen A. Herff, and by the University of Sydney through a Sydney Horizon Fellowship awarded to Dr Steffen A. Herff.
It was also supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) under the SPARK grant scheme awarded to Dr Steffen A. Herff (CRSK-1_196567 / 1).
The authors declare no competing interests.
About this music and social neuroscience research news
Author: Elissa Blake
Source: University of Sydney
Contact: Elissa Blake – University of Sydney
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News
Original Research: Open access.
“Solitary silence and social sounds: music can influence mental imagery, inducing thoughts of social interactions” by Steffen A. Herff et al. Scientific Reports
Abstract
Solitary silence and social sounds: music can influence mental imagery, inducing thoughts of social interactions
The COVID-19 pandemic was accompanied by a marked increase in the use of music listening for self-regulation.
During these challenging times, listeners reported they used music ‘to keep them company’; indicating that they may have turned to music for social solace.
However, whether this is simply a figure of speech or an empirically observable effect on social thought that extends into mental imagery was previously unclear, despite its great potential for applications.
Here, six hundred participants were presented with silence or task-irrelevant folk music in Italian, Spanish, or Swedish while performing a directed mental-imagery task in which they imagined a journey towards a topographical landmark.
To control and differentiate possible effects of vocals and semantics on imagined content, the music was presented with or without vocals to the participants, of which half were native speakers and the other half non-speakers of the respective languages.
As in previous studies, music, compared to silence, led to more vivid imagination and shaped emotional sentiment of the imagined content.
In addition, we show that social interactions emerged as a clear thematic cluster in participants’ descriptions of their imagined content through Latent Dirichlet Allocation.
Moreover, Bayesian Mixed effects models revealed that music increased imagined social content compared to silent baseline conditions. This effect remained robust irrespective of vocals or language comprehension.
Using stable diffusion, we generated visualisations of participants’ imagined content.
In a second experiment, a new group of participants’ ability to differentiate between visualisations of content imagined during silence and music listening increased when they listened to the associated music.
Results converge to show that music, indeed, can be good company.
