2026/05/12 by Connor Kirts, Tuomas Eerola · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Neuroscience · Psychology · #Diverse Music Education Insights #Neuroscience and Music Perception #Psychological Well-being and Life Satisfaction
paper · doi:10.31234/osf.io/pwfxv_v1
openalex publication_date 2026/05/12 · openalex created_date 2026/05/13 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/14
Musical meanings are central to emotional experiences and music appreciation, but they also tend to be difficult to describe and organise. Particularly for empirical research, there is a need for a structured measure that would identify the likely broad areas of musical meaning that people consider to impact their specific situation and context. We developed a state-based measure of Musical Meaning Inventory (MMI) based initially on a music appreciation framework that was operationalised and evaluated in earlier studies. Here we tested the initially hypothesised three factors of Musical Meanings (Self, Source, and Structure) in a series of exploratory factor analyses (EFA). In this experiment, 180 participants rated items representing the factors within the context-specific vignettes. The EFA revealed a five-factor solution, which was in turn verified with a second EFA round with a new set of participants (N = 59). The emerging structure and the highest-performing items from the EFA rounds were used in a new experiment applying CFA (N = 100). The CFA results confirmed the existence of five factors within the musical meanings (structure, memory, identity, object, and culture). The psychometric properties of the inventory were excellent (high reliability, good to excellent discriminant and convergent validity, achieving strict measurement invariance) with 15 items in total. The new tool is well suited to research contexts where the dimensions of musical meaning require efficient, multidimensional assessment.