A few notes — and the room around seems to disappear. Consciousness opens up, space changes.
One person sees a sunlit meadow, another feels a waking forest, a third watches small creatures that begin to dance and move. At first glance, these are completely personal fantasies, unrelated to each other. But what if music tells surprisingly similar stories to different people? What if this is not a coincidence but a pattern that can be seen in the brain's work?
New research shows that musical reveries have structure. Sound does not just create chaotic images — it guides the imagination, and the brain turns melody into an internal film with a recognizable plot and a tangible emotional atmosphere.
The story hidden between the notes
August 18, 2026 in the international journal Nature Communications an article was published that explains this mystery: Music evokes shared neural representations of imagined narratives across sensory modalities — "Music evokes shared neural representations of imagined narratives across sensory modalities".
The study was conducted by scientists from Princeton University: Itamar Jalon, Jamal Williams, Karen Electra Christianson, Cara Turnbull, Grace Simmons, Uri Hasson, and Elizabeth Margulis.
The scientists organized two sessions of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Each session involved 20 volunteers, specially selected for their ability to deeply immerse themselves in music and vividly imagine. In the first session, they listened to ten unfamiliar instrumental compositions, about a minute each, and were asked to imagine that each fragment told a story. After listening, participants verbally described everything that arose in their imagination.
On another day, they listened not to music but to verbal versions of the stories. The researchers compiled these narratives based on the stories that participants most often associated with each composition in the previous experiment.
Thus, the scientists obtained a unique opportunity to compare what happens in the brain when a person:
- listens to music and imagines a story;
- tells the emerging story in words;
- listens to the same story told in speech.
Different people — similar internal films
The results were astonishing. On average, 71% of the stories invented while listening to music matched the main story associated with a particular fragment. For stories heard in the form of verbal narration, the match reached 94% — close to full consensus.
One of the fragments was especially telling. Almost all listeners described a morning meadow, awakening nature, and small creatures that begin to move and play. The participants had never heard this music before the experiment, yet the scenes they created shared common features — as if the melody suggested the same story to everyone.
But this did not mean that the music had implanted an absolutely identical film in everyone's mind. The stories differed in details, characters, and personal associations. What coincided were the direction of imagination, the dynamics of action, and the emotional coloring—that is, the overall structure and meaning. The musical image proved to be simultaneously intimate and shared, personal and collective.
The brain does not merely hear—it creates meaning
Brain scan results revealed how this happens. During direct perception of music, the auditory areas of the cerebral cortex were activated, as expected. But when the researchers compared the three conditions—perception of music, retelling of an imagined plot, and perception of the same plot in words—the similarity appeared in completely different places.
Similar patterns were found in the associative cortex and the default mode network of the brain, or default mode network. This system is involved in integrating information, memories, reflections about oneself and others, internal simulation of events, and narrative construction.
The mechanism of this still remains partly a mystery, but the essence is clear: the brain perceives low-level elements of sound—timbre, pitch, rhythm, movement—and then connects them with images, emotions, and cultural associations accumulated over a lifetime. Thus, a few notes can transform into a space, a character, an action, or an entire scene.
The authors of the study suggest the existence of a kind of internal "dictionary" in which musical gestures are linked to concepts and images. Soft arpeggios lead to states of sleep and fantasy; rolling drums and brass instruments evoke a sense of solemnity, power, and grandeur. But this is not a literal dictionary with fixed, universal translations. Musical meanings are deeply dependent on culture, the listener's life experience, the context of listening, and the emotional content of the work itself.
Music quietly guides thought
Elizabeth Margulis, director of the Music Cognition Lab at Princeton University, calls the images, memories, and imagined scenes that arise during listening musical daydreams — musical reveries. Her book is also devoted to this topic Transported: The Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams, published in 2026.
The mechanism is simple but profound. A familiar song can take us back to childhood, remind us of first love, a summer trip, or a home that no longer exists. But even completely new, unfamiliar music can lead the mind to a certain place, create a certain mood.
It does this through a system of associations that each of us unconsciously forms throughout our lives. Music does not "hack the brain" in a literal sense—that is just a vivid but imprecise metaphor. Instead, it activates existing neural connections and gently guides the spontaneous movement of thought in a certain direction. Thus, an experience that seems utterly intimate and unique turns out to be similar to the experience of many other people.
What the study actually proved
However, it is important to understand the limits of the conclusions. The authors do not claim that every musical composition contains a single "correct" plot or that all listeners perceive music in the same way. That would be an overgeneralization.
First, the experiment was small: only 20 people participated, who were preselected for their ability to vividly imagine and deeply immerse themselves in music. Such a sample may not represent a broad audience. Second, two of the ten musical fragments had to be excluded from the analysis—their quiet beginnings were drowned out by the noise of the tomograph, which skewed the results.
Therefore, this is not at all about reading minds or discovering a universal musical language, as it is sometimes called in popular culture. The discovery is much subtler and more precise: music is indeed capable of directing the imagination of different people toward similar meaning and content, and these common neural patterns can be objectively detected through brain scanning.
Music conveys not a ready-made message but an invitation to a story. And each listener enters it in their own way, using their own experience and imagination.
What music opens up new worlds?
The study does not determine which genre or style affects the imagination more strongly than others. But logic suggests an important observation: inner stories are born especially freely where music does not explain itself fully, does not impose a rigid script.
This could be an unfamiliar instrumental composition, cinematic orchestration, meditative ambient, minimalism, or a melody with unexpected harmonic turns. Such music leaves room for imagination. It does not show a ready-made film but creates a direction—a sense of space, movement, light, approach, or flight. It offers the skeleton of a plot, leaving the flesh to your imagination.
Perhaps music that opens up new worlds is music that has enough form to guide the imagination and enough freedom for it to take flight. It is a delicate balance between structure and uncertainty.
It does not show a ready-made picture—it merely opens the door a crack.
And at that moment, science meets poetry not as adversaries but as neighbors looking in the same direction. Thomas Stearns Eliot wrote in "Four Quartets", in the section "The Dry Salvages":
"Music heard so deeply that it is not heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts."
Perhaps it is at that very moment, when music ceases to be something external, something that merely enters the ears, that the most important thing happens. We no longer just listen to a story from the sidelines, like spectators in a cinema. We step into it—and ourselves become the music, its voice, its body, its meaning.
