A master thesis from Aalborg University
Tell Me What You See, an investigation on Visual Mental Imagery evoked by instrumental music
Author(s)
Term
4. Term
Education
Publication year
2019
Submitted on
2019-05-28
Abstract
Visual Mental Imagery (VMI) consists of ’seeing’ in the absence of a sensory stimulus. This thesis aims to analyze if instrumental music can foster VMI and if it is possible to associate sonic elements of the music with visual features of the imagery. The investigation was conducted through an online survey consisting of a listening test with one song (among four possible ones, two created by us and two commercial recordings) and some questions. Participants were asked if they experienced VMI, to describe it and to select descriptive elements from a list. 72.6% of 135 effective participants reported experiencing VMI (c2 = 27.6; df = 1; p<0.002). Results show that instrumental music fosters VMI on different levels of vividness. The descriptions and the elements-selection task confirmed that mixing sonic elements from two different songs leads to a third song whose imagery features visual elements belonging to the imageries of both original songs.
Keywords
Documents
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