In a new paper appearing Aug. 18 in Nature Communications , Princeton University researchers show how music produces distinct patterns in the regions of the brain associated with imagination and meaning, similar to those prompted by spoken narratives.
The new study, “Music Evokes Shared Neural Representations of Imagined Narratives Across Sensory Modalities,” used fMRI to scan people’s brains while they listened to 10 of the same unfamiliar pieces of instrumental music and 10 of the same spoken stories across two different sessions. After each excerpt of music or speech, they described what they had imagined while listening.
The fMRI scans showed that imaginative and meaning-making networks were similarly activated whether prompted by music or speech, and that varied listeners reported shared associations to the same unfamiliar musical excerpts. Researchers found that an average of 71 percent of participants matched the “consensus” story for each musical excerpt.
Additionally, fMRI scans showed that matched excerpts of speech and music, which triggered the same imagined story, also evoked similar patterns in the same regions of the brain. This included not only auditory regions, which process the sounds of speech and music, but also the brain’s higher-level default mode network, which interconnects regions for imagination, memory and meaning.
“What we’re seeing here is this whole other dimension of meaning making in music,” said principal investigator Elizabeth Margulis, a Princeton music professor and director of the University’s Music Cognition Lab, and author of “Transported: The Everyday Magic of Musical Daydreams” (Liveright, 2026). “People sometimes characterize music as an abstract stimulus, but what we’re seeing is that listeners are engaging in a very concrete meaning-making process.”
The research could open a window into what happens in the brain during spontaneous thought as the mind wanders, Margulis said. The research may in the future also suggest clinical applications in treating cases of depression or anxiety in which patients become fixated on a particular thought pattern.
Uri Hasson, a Princeton professor of psychology and neuroscience and a co-author of the new Nature Communications paper, has previously found that the brains of people watching the same movie or listening to the same story also responded similarly.
In addition to Margulis and Hasson, co-authors of the study were Itamar Jalon, Jamal Williams and Grace Simmons of the Department of Psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, and Karen Electra Christianson and Cara Turnbull of the Department of Music.
The research was funded by the Office of the Dean for Research’s Innovation Fund, which encourages partnerships between Princeton faculty in the arts and the sciences.
Nature Communications
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Music Evokes Shared Neural Representations of Imagined Narratives Across Sensory Modalities
18-Aug-2026