Special issue on musical imagery: About those earworms!

Abstract

Psychomusicology: Music, Mind, & Brain (PMMB) is pleased to publish this Special Issue on under the most able guest editorship of Freya Bailes. imagery- hearing music apart from the presence of external sound-is a topic at the forefront of music psychology today. In the early history of music psychology, it was also of genuine interest (MacDougal, 1898; Seashore, 1919, pp. 211-235). Its legitimacy as a focus for research, however, diminished during the behaviorist Zeitgeist. The subsequent cognitive era, beginning in the 1970s, paved a way once again for research on mental phenomena (Cohen, 2009; Gjerdingen, 2013). Daniel Reisberg (1992) brought the topic of musical imagery into focus through his edited book entitled Auditory which contained several chapters on musical imagery. Even the discussion of mental representation of sound itself was a step forward at that time when the study of perception was primarily visual perception. In 1999, Rolf Inge Godoy and Harold Jorgensen arranged that the 6th International Conference on Systematic and Comparative Musicology (Oslo, Norway) be dedicated to musical imagery. An edited volume based mostly on presentations at that meeting was subsequently published (Godoy & Jorgensen, 2001).However, a few more years passed before several researchers, primarily in the United Kingdom, began to focus on involuntary musical imagery, sometimes referred to as earworms (which many readers may be helplessly experiencing at this moment). The subjective and idiosyncratic nature of involuntary musical imagery seems beyond the control of not only the individual hearer, but also that of the would-be researcher. Thus, involuntary musical imagery has remained for the most part a curiosity outside the realm of scientific investigation. Fortunately, however, the undaunted pioneers asked the right questions and devised ingenious methods for exploring the phenomena. Their work and the related work of other authors is brought together in this special issue of PMMB entitled Musical Imagery, thanks to the steadfast initiative of Freya Bailes. The special issue, to the best of my knowledge, provides the first compilation of research articles on musical imagery that includes the topic of involuntary musical imagery. In its offering of new empirical findings, methodologies, assessment tools, literature overviews, and theories, it will surely provide both a foundation and inspiration for future work on musical imagery for years to come. I invite all readers of this special issue to take hold of this inspiration, conduct follow-up research on musical imagery, and submit your manuscripts as soon as you can to PMMB. …