Characteristics of Spontaneous Musical Imagery
This study follows upon Steven Brown's 2006 article in The Journal of Consciousness Studies about the "perpetual music track," a form of constant musical imagery. With Brown's assistance, a Musical Imagery Questionnaire was developed and administered to 67 participants with the intention of establishing relevant scales for quantifying the presence and extent of spontaneous musical imagery in individuals. In addition to the Musical Imagery Questionnaire, the Six Factor Personality Questionnaire, as well as the Transliminality Scale, which is a measure of openness to psychological material, was used in order to explore the correlations of spontaneous musical imagery to personality constructs. Factor analysis of the responses to the Musical Imagery Questionnaire revealed six meaningful dimensions of spontaneous musical imagery that were labeled as Unconscious, Persistent, Entertainment, Completeness, Musicianship, and Distraction. Participants who scored high on Transliminality also tended to have more persistent, distracting, and unconscious musical imagery. There were also some smaller correlations with other personality variables. Characteristics of Spontaneous Musical Imagery 3 The apparently common experience of having a tune "stuck in one's head" is the characteristic of one's stream of consciousness that prompted this study. The first author has had a great deal of personal experience with this phenomenon. Not only has he experienced songs in his head that he had not heard in months or years, but sometimes there have been songs present that he had never before heard in his life; in other words, songs that were, to the best of his knowledge, original musical material. The effortless and unpremeditated experience of unconstrained mental music falls along a dimension that is here referred to as "spontaneous musical imagery." Considering that many people have, at some time, experienced having a song "stuck in their head," it seems logical to suppose that the extent to which one experiences musical imagery can be placed along a continuum. At one extreme, one might not experience any musical imagery at all, whereas, at the other extreme, a person could hear inner music constantly. This latter phenomenon has been identified as the "Perpetual Music Track" by Steven Brown, a trained musician and professor. In an article in an earlier issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, Brown (2006) analyzed the music in his own head according to pitch, timbre, note quality, chord progression, and other theoretical qualities that would be less familiar to non specialist music listening audiences. Brown also noted whether this music was perpetual. Two difficulties with Brown's study, however, are its musically technical nature and the limitations of its scope. Brown neither explored potential origins of this imagery nor did he attempt to quantify it. For a musician, his article is interesting to read, but it lacks generalizability. Aside from Brown, however, not much research has been done in this area. Lipson (2006) like Brown, analyzed his own musical imagery. His article, while intriguing, relies heavily on personal analysis and Freudian interpretations of the characteristics of his imagery. In a study by Kopacz (2005) researchers administered a 16 factor personality questionnaire to participants and asked them to indicate their favourite piece of music. These pieces were put on compact discs and given to professional musicians and music professors who scrutinized the pitch, timbre, chord progressions, and other technical features of the pieces in a similar fashion to Brown's analysis. The relations of these features to each participant's personality scores were then examined. It was discovered that individuals who scored higher in the personality factors Social Boldness, Liveliness, Extraversion, and Openness to Change also seemed to prefer music pieces with a fast tempo and a great number of melodic themes. It was also shown that individuals who scored high in Vigilance preferred fewer melodic themes. As is the case with Brown's study as well, however, technical language that would be lost on non specialists is used to describe the music by the participants. In relevant literature, most previous research regarding the interaction between personality variables and music focused on musical preference. Research involving both music and personality includes everything from studies of music preference in relation to personality factors, to the effectiveness of certain personalities of music teachers and the use of music therapy on different personality types. In a more recent study of its kind, Renfrow and Gosling (2003) studied the personality correlates of music preference. Renfrow and Gosling found that, among other findings, individuals who score higher on scales for agreeableness, conscientiousness, and extraversion, and lower on openness are more likely to prefer conventional and upbeat music. Other studies' findings range from the specific and entertaining personalities and preferences for certain types of rock music, for example to more broad and applicable findings, for example, types of music associated with depression or a preoccupation with suicidal ideation. While this previous research is interesting and certainly valuable, it is not Characteristics of Spontaneous Musical Imagery 4 directly relevant to the focus of this study, that is, spontaneous, inwardly generated musical imagery. The purpose of this study was to determine the extent and characteristics of spontaneous musical imagery (SMI) of both musicians and non musicians in musically non technical terms and to attempt to qualitatively understand how people experience musical imagery by making attributions about its probable source. Furthermore, an effort was made to establish any relationships of musical preferences and personality traits with the presence and extent of musical imagery. With the help of Steven Brown, the Musical Imagery Questionnaire (MIQ) was developed to measure the presence and extent of spontaneous musical imagery. The quantitative scores and qualitative descriptions obtained from this questionnaire were compared to scores on a standard personality test as well as on a particular trait known as Transliminality. Transliminality is a psychological construct that was proposed by Michael Thalbourne (1991) and is based on the idea that, just as there is a membrane between human organs, there is a psychological membrane between conscious and unconscious parts of the psyche that has varying degrees of permeability that depend on the individual person. In developing a measure of Transliminality, Thalbourne and Delin (1994) defined Transliminality as "a largely involuntary susceptibility to and awareness of large volumes of inwardly generated psychological phenomena of an ideational and affective kind" (p. 25) Transliminality is the single construct underlying six variables: Belief in, and experience of, the paranormal; magical ideation; creative personality; mystical experience; manic like experience; and depressive experience (Houran, Thalbourne, Lange, 2003) If the presence of these other phenomena is an indication of a higher degree of communication between the unconscious and conscious, that is, a higher degree of permeability of a psychological membrane, then perhaps spontaneous musical imagery also arises from the unconscious, with the extent to which individuals experience it depending on the degree of Transliminality. One of the purposes of this study is to explore this relationship. In order to provide some basis for comparison and some background, other instances where Transliminality was measured and analyzed are useful. In a 2005 study, Thalbourne, Keough, &Witt, gave 186 participants in both Australia and the United Kingdom the Transliminality Form B and the Oxford Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences. The Oxford Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences is a measure of Schizotypal dimensions and was found to correlate 0.78 with Transliminality scores, suggesting that the questionnaires may measure the same phenomena, or that the phenomena all come from the same underlying process. Another study by Sherwood and Milner (2004 05) found positive and significant correlations ranging from r 0.38 to r 0.62 between scores on the Transliminality Form B and three specific subscales of a questionnaire called Hartman's Boundary Structure Questionnaire. The boundaries measured by the three subscales that yielded the significant correlations are the boundaries between sleep, waking and dreaming; the boundary between usual and unusual experiences; and the boundaries between thoughts, feelings, and moods, again suggesting that the different questionnaires are measuring similar phenomena. Thalbourne (1999) also attempted to show a relationship between experienced vividness of visual images and Transliminality using the Transliminality Form B and the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire. A positive correlation was found but it was not significant, which may, according to Thalbourne, suggest that either the Visual Imagery Questionnaire is flawed, or that Transliminality does not necessarily entail visual imagery at all. This study will explore a similar proposed relationship, only with musical imagery. Characteristics of Spontaneous Musical Imagery 5 Two hypotheses are proposed. First, it is believed that those with a higher degree of Transliminality, as measured by the Transliminality Form B (Thalbourne, 1998) will experience more musical imagery as measured by the Musical Imagery Questionnaire designed for this study. It is also believed that individuals high on the personality factors Openness and Independence will have a higher degree of Transliminality and experience more musical imagery. It is important to note, though, that notwithstanding these hypotheses, this is a pilot study whose main purpose is