2026/06/15 by Hazel A van der Walle, Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, Kelly Jakubowski · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Neuroscience · #Associative property #Cognition #Context effect #Diverse Music Education Insights #Framing (construction) #Framing effect #Indexicality #Media Influence and Health #Neuroscience and Music Perception #Perception #Social perception
paper · doi:10.31234/osf.io/zup69_v1
openalex publication_date 2026/06/15 · openalex created_date 2026/06/17 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/14
When we listen to music, what we think about is rarely shaped by sound alone. This study tested whether contextual framing cues—phrases locating music within a familiar social or cultural situation—systematically align listeners’ music-influenced mental content (MIMC). Using a between-participants design, 160 participants heard 16 unfamiliar instrumental clips (Electronic, Jazz, Metal, and Eighties-pop) each accompanied by one of four context cues (bar, concert, movie, video game). Semantic and lexical similarity of participants’ MIMCs described after each clip were quantified using complementary natural language processing pipelines: sentence-embedding model, MiniLM (semantic; 1,919,820 individual-level pairwise comparisons), and TF-IDF (lexical; 2,016 aggregated document-level comparisons). Listeners who received the same context cue produced more semantically similar MIMC than those given both a different clip and context cue—a finding replicated at the lexical level and confirmed in linear mixed models controlling for genre, clip, and individual response tendencies. Music remained the stronger driver of convergence: MIMC were significantly more similar with same-clip pairs than same-context pairs. Both factors contributed additively, with combined clip-and-context alignment producing the greatest convergence overall. Genre moderated this balance: Metal consistently showed the greatest context framing susceptibility across both pipelines and was the only genre where contextual framing exceeded music as a driver of within-genre similarity; Jazz showed the smallest framing susceptibility. Believability of the clip–context pairing significantly predicted lexical (TF-IDF) but not semantic (MiniLM) similarity, suggesting framing operated through associative priming rather than conscious plausibility judgement. These findings provide an empirical test of source sensitivity in MIMC, demonstrating that even newly introduced contextual frames are sufficient to meaningfully constrain the distributed subjectivity of MIMC in music listening experiences.