Music boosts vivid mental imagery while traffic noise changes where the mind goes

By Tarun Sai LomteReviewed by Susha Cheriyedath, M.Sc.Apr 2 2026

A new study shows that music and traffic noise do not just fill the background. They can reshape how vividly, emotionally, and even how far and how fast people imagine moving through a scene.

Study: Traffic jams: music and traffic noise interact to influence the vividness, sentiment, and spatiotemporal properties of directed mental imagery. Image Credit: Nicoleta Ionescu / Shutterstock

In a recent study published in the journal Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, researchers assessed how traffic noise, music, and their combination influence perceived sentiment and vividness, as well as the spatiotemporal properties of directed mental imagery. 

Mental imagery differs from true perception and is a primary component of daily cognitive capacities, such as language comprehension, self-regulation, memory, future planning, and decision-making. Directed mental imagery refers to intentional, goal-directed mental imagery, usually intended to achieve a goal, whereas undirected mental imagery is akin to mind-wandering.

Music can effectively modulate imagery characteristics. It can enhance the vividness of imagery substantially, on average, and increase positive emotional sentiment. It can also alter the nature and content of mental imagery. While music can influence mental imagery characteristics, the impact of other auditory stimuli, such as noise, particularly traffic noise, remains less well studied in directed mental imagery tasks.

About the study

In the present study, researchers evaluated the effects of music, traffic noise, and their combination on the vividness and sentiment of directed mental imagery, alongside imagined time, distance, and an exploratory measure of imagined speed. Participants were undergraduate students from an Australian university. The auditory stimuli included three musical pieces and four traffic noise samples. Subjects heard only the first 105 seconds of each musical piece.

The traffic noise clip was a low-diversity city noise stimulus, featuring a constant, subtle traffic flow, car horns, and combustion engines. The six-minute traffic noise clip was split into four 105-second segments. In the combined music-traffic noise setting, the music was set to be louder than the noise. Specifically, the noise was 15 dB softer than the music.

Participants first viewed a visual inducer, a 15-second video of a video game’s opening sequence. The clip featured a figure ascending a hill, with a vague landmark visible in the far distance from the summit. Participants were asked to close their eyes after viewing the visual inducer and imagine the figure walking towards the landmark. This mental imagery task lasted 90 seconds, with a gong sound signaling the start and end.

Subjects heard music, noise, music plus traffic noise, or silence from the start of the visual inducer until the end of the task. Subsequently, they completed six questions to quantify imagined distance, time, and vividness. The above process was repeated for each condition over eight trials. The National Language Tool Kit and the Valence Aware Dictionary for Sentiment Reasoning model were used to assess imagined sentiment.

Findings

The study included 107 participants, including 23 males and 84 females, aged 17–50 years. Participants reported more vivid imagery across all conditions than in the silence condition. Vividness was comparable between traffic noise, music, and music-traffic noise conditions. Notably, music and music-traffic noise conditions elicited more positive sentiment in the imagined content than silence did. Imagined content sentiment was comparable between traffic noise and silence conditions.

The music-traffic noise and music conditions led to more positive imagined content than the traffic noise condition. The music condition also showed more positive imagined content than the music-traffic noise condition, suggesting that adding traffic noise dampened music’s positive emotional effect. The imagined travel time was greater in music and music-traffic noise conditions than in the silence and traffic noise conditions. Consistently, imagined travel time was greater in the music condition than in the music-traffic noise condition.

Further, the imagined travel distance was greater in all conditions compared to silence. However, music and music-traffic noise conditions led to greater imagined distances than the traffic noise condition, and were comparable to each other. Notably, imagined speed was greater in traffic and music-traffic noise conditions compared to silence. There was no evidence that imagined speed differed between music and silence conditions.

Imagined speed was slower in the music condition than in the traffic noise and music-traffic noise conditions. The probability of imagining traffic-related content was comparable between the music and silence conditions. However, the probability was higher in the traffic noise and music-traffic noise conditions than in the silence and music conditions.

Participants imagined more traffic-related content in the traffic noise condition than in the music-traffic noise condition. This traffic-content analysis, however, was exploratory rather than part of the main preregistered hypotheses.

Conclusions

In sum, the study explored whether traffic noise, music, or their combination influences the characteristics of emotional sentiment, vividness, imagined distance, and imagined time in a directed mental imagery task. Results show that music enhanced vividness, imagined time, imagined distance, and positive sentiment compared to silence.

Traffic noise elicited a similar effect on vividness but a lesser effect on emotional sentiment, imagined distance, and imagined time, increasing vividness and distance but not positive sentiment or imagined time.

The combined music-traffic noise condition reduced the effect on sentiment, without affecting imagined distance, vividness, or imagined time. Notably, traffic noise led to faster imagined speed and was also reflected in participants' imagined content, highlighting its influence on mental imagery.

These results suggest that auditory environments, including those with background noise, can shape different aspects of mental imagery in different ways rather than uniformly enhancing it. 

The authors also noted potential relevance for imagery-based therapeutic settings, while cautioning that the online design, participants’ own listening devices, the specific sound samples used, and the young university-based sample may limit generalizability.