Explaining Musical Imagination

Contemporary psychology of music approaches musical imagination in terms of either cognitive system’s specific (voluntary, involuntary or anticipatory) behavior or capacity. Musical imagination-as-behaviour allows us, for example, to consciously experience the phenomenon of “musical earworms” (e.g., Beaman & Williams, 2010). However, we do not have to be conscious of the workings of musical imagination-as-capacity (e.g., to form mental representations of music). It would be however quite reasonable to assume that this capacity is the result of the existence and activities between more basic sub-capacities organized together in such a way that they result in experiential manifestations of musical imagination. The study of imagination-ascapacity has, in fact, a long-standing philosophical tradition (Schlutz, 2009). Various philosophers proposed that a distinct role of imagination-as-capacity in cognitive processing is to organize, identify or interpret sensory information in order to represent and understand environment. In this sense, imagination is a constructive process that enables the creation and continuous update of the subjective experiences, providing the basis for interpretation of upcoming information. 1 Such view on imagination is also received in cognitive musicology. For instance, Hargreaves (2012) argues that musical imagination is the cognitive basis of musical perception and production. The big question, however, is how (on what basis) does musical imagination work? Currently there seems to be no agreement on how to integrate different theoretical and empirical data within an unified and complete explanation of the phenomenon in question. One the one hand, for example, we can assume that musical imagination relies on some specific kind of information-processing. On the other, however, in order to specify what kinds of