Basslines, Bodies, and Beehive Haircuts: What do we think about when we listen to music?

Music influences distinct and specific mental content, including fictional narratives, autobiographical recall, and visual mental imagery. These imaginative responses are relevant in specialised contexts like therapy and play a vital role in everyday cognition, creativity, memory, attention, and well‑being. However, prior studies are typically constrained to one isolated thought type, use limited musical diversity, or interpret intricate imaginings through quantitative ratings—flattening the complexity of these experiences. Computational qualitative analyses can process large datasets, but fail to capture contextual richness and nuance available through human-driven qualitative analysis. What is missing is an open, manual qualitative examination of the fuller breadth of music-influenced mental content (MIMC)—an approach capable of preserving the depth and human subtleties that quantitative, predefined, isolated, and computational approaches overlook. We analysed participants’ free‑response MIMC descriptions, not restricting probing to isolated types or predefined thought-type categories. Music stimuli—120 instrumental clips from the MUSIFEAST-17 stimulus set—spanned 10 stylistically diverse genres: Ambient, Classical, Electronic, Film, Funk, Jazz, Metal, Pop, 60s-pop, 80s-pop. A total of 1,786 UK and US participants aged 18–75 years listened to 10 clips (one from each genre), reported whether they experienced imaginative responses, and provided open-text descriptions. Rigorous, mixed-method qualitative analysis was conducted on 14,091 MIMC descriptions, involving multiple coding passes, multi-coder reliability checks, thematic analysis, and co-occurrence network analysis. The resulting thematic framework functions as a typology of music-influenced “thoughtscapes”, revealing multi-faceted MIMC unfolding across narrational, referential, and experiential dimensions, offering a structured account of a fuller spectrum of listeners’ imaginative experiences.