Toward a Neuro-Yijing Model: Musical Imagery, Affect, and Reflective Experience in Chinese Programmatic Music

Neuroaesthetic research has often examined aesthetic experience through measurable categories such as beauty, pleasure, preference, prediction, and reward. Although these approaches have produced important insights, they do not fully explain how culturally situated musical experience may be organized around sound-induced scene formation, atmosphere, temporal openness, emotional restraint, memory, and reflective awareness. This article brings the Chinese aesthetic concept of yijing into dialogue with neuroaesthetics and music cognition and proposes a preliminary Neuro-Yijing Model as a conceptual and hypothesis-generating framework. The model comprises three interrelated and recursive dimensions: perceptual–imaginal formation, affective resonance, and reflective integration. Through a conceptually guided analysis of Xiyang Xiaogu (Evening Drum and Flute at Sunset), anchored in a publicly available 1999 pipa performance by Wu Man and its programmatic notes, the article distinguishes between sound-based affordances and verbal–cultural framing in the formation of imagined scene and affective meaning. The term “Neuro” is used here not to claim an identified neural basis for yijing, but to position yijing as a cultural–aesthetic framework for refining questions about imagery, embodied listening, affect, memory, and self-referential cognition. The model’s added value lies in treating sound–scene transformation, culturally mediated affect, and contemplative completion as a unified but testable process rather than as isolated perceptual, emotional, or self-related components.