Media influence on listeners’ visual imagery

Abstract

Music listening is not only a pleasant form of entertainment, it is also a form of communication which is decoded and interpreted by the listener’s mind. Usually music is associated with emotional experience, however there are other extramusical associations evoked during music listening, such as visual imagery. It is a cognitive sensation without the actual external visual stimulus, and it can be experienced as a memory or imagination, or a synthesis of both. This paper presents an empirical qualitative and interdisciplinary research with 24 listeners, results of which show that most subjects of the study experienced visual imagery as a response to music (~95% on average based on listening to different musical excerpts) and there was a strong sociocultural influence on extramusical perception with a specific link being between audiovisual media products (e.g., films and music videos)and music-induced visual imagery. Since the music-induced associations were generally influenced by the listeners’ sociocultural environment which they shared, it resulted in perceiving somewhat similar (and in some cases almost identical) associations and meanings induced by music even if the subjects were not familiar with the specific musical pieces. This reaffirms that music listening and especially its perception including visual imagery is more social than personal, as it may seem in some cases, experience since music exists within the same sociocultural context where the music is produced and the listeners come from. These and other empirical findings show how music listening is a complex but also rather creative process due to the audible music having the capacity to evoke various responses that include multifaceted extramusical associations full of emotional and visual content influenced by the sociocultural environment and, specifically, media.