Introduction and Overview

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book provides one account of how multimodal mental imagery may work in musical contexts. It addresses visual mental imagery (VMI) in various musical contexts, ranging from shamanic rituals to music therapy, and emphasize the individuality of VMI experiences during music listening. The book illuminates musical imagery—similar to Floridou—but with a focus on the connection between actions and sounds, building on his extensive work on sound-motion objects. It introduces subjective and behavioural measures of music-evoked visual imagery and auditory imagery for music, highlighting a number of imagery-related dimensions that researchers usually assess with self-reports. The book provides practical guidance in choosing the appropriate method for identifying neural correlates of music-related mental imagery.