Music evokes shared neural representations of imagined narratives across sensory modalities

Abstract

The human capacity to construct and share subjective experiences from diverse sensory inputs is central to human cognition, and is vividly exemplified through music listening. Direct, focused music perception has been extensively studied while free, imaginative listening, typical of real-world engagement with music, has not. Here, we identify shared neural representations for imaginings evoked by matched excerpts of music and speech across listeners. Twenty participants freely imagine stories while listening to ten music excerpts in an fMRI scanner, then recount their imaginings. Stories for each excerpt are highly similar between listeners. Stimulus-specific spatial patterns are observed in auditory regions for music perception, speech perception, and music report. Triple pattern similarity across all conditions reveals unique spatial patterns in default mode, language, and association regions. These findings demonstrate that music elicits detectable, modality-general brain representations specific to particular excerpts, pointing to a shared neural basis for meaning-making across diverse sensory inputs. When people listen to music, they often imagine remarkably similar stories. The authors show these shared imaginings selectively rely on stimulus-specific patterns in a set of modality-general brain regions.