Why We Remember Music and Forget Everything Else
"In a 2010 study published in Music Perception, Halpern and colleagues had musicians listen to the first minute of familiar classical pieces and record their judgments of the emotions they were hearing in the music through their valence and arousal. Then, the participants did the experiment again while just imagining the first minute of these songs playing in their minds. “The overlap in their profiles was astonishing, which means that they were doing this complicated piece in real time and extracting the same emotions,” Halpern says. The musicians were able to map the emotions expressed in the music even when it was playing in their heads and imagine the music so vividly that their scores were almost identical.
This shows that we can quite accurately recreate some aspects of music in our minds. “Imagining music is actually a very similar experience to perceiving music,” Jakubowski says. “There [are] very strong parallels in terms of the brain activation you see when you imagine music versus when you perceive music.”