Measuring mental music: Comparing retrospective and experience sampling methods for assessing musical imagery.

Musical imagery—hearing music in your mind that isn’t playing in the environment—has been investigated using both retrospective methods (self-report scales of typical experiences) and in vivo methods (assessing inner music as it happens in daily life). But because musical imagery is often fleeting and on the fringe of conscious attention, retrospective self-report measures of inner music might correspond poorly with people’s actual experience of inner music. The present research thus compared reports from a retrospective measure of musical imagery (the Involuntary Musical Imagery Scale) and a week of intensive experience sampling in a sample of 132 young adults. For 7 days, participants were signaled 14 times daily between 8 a.m. and midnight. Both methods assessed the frequency and length of imagery episodes and the subjective qualities of the experience: its valence, whether people moved along with the imagery, and if the imagery helped their current activities. People’s retrospective reports of the frequency and length of their musical imagery experiences were more strongly related to their in-the-moment reports, whereas their retrospective reports of the qualities of inner music experiences were largely unrelated to in-the-moment reports. In general, musical expertise was more strongly related to the in-the-moment reports of musical imagery than their retrospective counterparts. The gap between how people actually experience inner music in daily life and their b...
Source: Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research