Seeing sound, shaping stories: The role of ideasthesia and event segmentation in musically evoked narratives

Musically evoked narrative imaginings (MENI) are mental stories that listeners construct in response to shifts in musical features such as dynamics, tempo, and timbre. Event segmentation – the cognitive process of identifying transitions in continuous stimuli – shapes these narratives. In music-colour synaesthesia (MCS), sounds involuntarily evoke colours and visual forms, offering perceptual anchors that may enhance event segmentation and narrative coherence. This article presents a novel theoretical framework integrating ideasthesia – the view that synaesthetic experiences are conceptually mediated rather than purely sensory-driven – with event segmentation theory to explain how MCS shapes MENI. It argues that synaesthetic percepts align with musical transitions to increase segmentation precision, strengthen narrative continuity, and deepen emotional and thematic engagement. Rather than treating MCS as an isolated phenomenon, it is situated within a broader continuum of music cognition and narrative construction, suggesting it magnifies processes shared across listeners. This perspective calls for further research into how multimodal mental imagery influences music perception, emotional response, and memory for musical narratives.