Basslines, Bodies, and Beehive Haircuts: What do we think about when we listen to music?

Music influences diverse mental content—fictional narratives, autobiographical recall, visual imagery, multimodal imaginings—with wide-reaching implications for everyday cognition, creativity, and wellbeing. Prior studies often examine thought types in isolation, limit musical diversity, or reduce experiential complexity through quantitative ratings and automated text-analytic methods such as natural language processing, flattening contextual richness. To address this, we introduce Music-Influenced Mental Content (MIMC) as a unified conceptual framework capturing the full heterogeneity of mental contents shaped by music. We analysed free-response MIMC descriptions from 1,786 UK and US participants (aged 18–75), each hearing 10 of 120 instrumental clips spanning 10 genres (Ambient, Classical, Electronic, Film, Funk, Jazz, Metal, Pop, 60s-pop, 80s-pop). Mixed-method qualitative and network analyses of 14,091 MIMC descriptions reveal that, rather than a collection of isolated content types, MIMC is best understood as an interconnected system. Organised across three themes—Narrational, Referential, and Experiential—this study provides one empirically grounded instantiation of the MIMC framework within a Western listener sample and stimulus set.