Date: 14 September 2026
Location: Teaching & Learning Centre (TLC) Room 116, South Rd, Durham DH1 3LS, Durham University
Time: 10:00 – 17:30
Registration deadline: 27 August 2026
To register to attend this free, in-person event please visit https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1993630220657?aff=oddtdtcreator
This one-day workshop will feature a range of projects from Durham’s Music Psychology Lab on how music shapes listeners’ ongoing thoughts and mental imagery. Featured guest Professor Elizabeth Margulis (Princeton University) will present on her highly influential work on narrative engagement with music. The workshop will also bring this work into wider dialogue with academics working on methods to capture inner experience and projects on imaginative experiences evoked by other art forms (e.g., fiction reading, visual art).
Coffee and light lunch will be provided to all attendees.
This workshop is sponsored by the Centre for Research into Inner Experience and our research in this area is funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
Programme:
10:00-10:30: Welcome and Overview of Leverhulme Project “Using Music to Investigate Perceptual and Cognitive Constraints on Imagination” (Kelly Jakubowski, Durham University)
10:30-11:00: Narrative Engagement with Music (Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, Princeton University)
11:00-11:20: Discussion
11:20-11:35: Coffee Break
11:35-11:50: Developing Methods for Capturing Listeners’ Ongoing Thoughts in Live Concert Settings (Nao Toyama, Durham University)
11:50-12:05: Exploring the Influence of Music’s Semantic Associations on Autobiographical Memories (Fruzsina Szücs, Durham University)
12:05-12:15: Discussion
12:15-12:20: Comfort Break
12:20-12:40: Unusual Music-Evoked Visual Imagery in an Individual with Sequence-Space Synaesthesia: The Role of Music Familiarity (Lia Kvavilashvili, University of Hertfordshire)
12:40-12:55: Colouring the Musical Imagination: Narrative Engagement, Event Segmentation, and Music–Colour Synaesthesia (Caroline Curwen, Durham University)
12:55-13:05: Discussion
13:05-14:10: Lunch
14:10-14:30: Using Natural Language Processing to Explore the Factors Impacting the Semantic Content of Music-Evoked Thoughts (Wei Wu, Durham University)
14:30-14:45: Listening Out Loud (LOL): Understanding Musical Structure Through Time-Aligned Spoken Annotations (Robert Lieck, Durham University)
14:45-15:05: Descriptive Experience Sampling as a Method for Understanding Music-Related Experience (Charles Fernyhough, Durham University)
15:05-15:35: Discussion: What are the current methodological opportunities and challenges for research on music and imagination/mental imagery?
15:35-16:00: Coffee Break
16:00-16:20: Fiction Reading: Exploring the Diversity of Imagination (Georgia Punton, Durham University)
16:20-16:40: When Art Starts to Speak: Inner Speech in the Experience of Visual Art (Aleks Fadeev, KU Leuven)
16:40-17:10: Discussion: How does imaginative experience vary across art forms? What methodological and theoretical sharing would be useful across research on the arts and imagination?
17:10-17:15: Closing remarks
Music & Science 