Music perception and musical preferences in people who experience anauralia – the absence of auditory imagery

This brief report summarises a presentation delivered by the first author at The Mind’s Ear and Inner Voice 2025 conference. This research investigated musical ability, engagement and preferences of people who report no internal experience of auditory imagery, which has been termed ‘anauralia’. Data were collected in collaboration with themusiclab.org, a citizen science website dedicated to researching auditory perception via gamified experiments. We begin by reporting relationships between self-reported auditory imagery and self-reports of musical ability and engagement. The former included the ability to sing in tune or tap in time with a beat as well as musical training and self-reported skill. The latter included time spent listening to music and a rating of overall enjoyment of music. We also examined relationships between auditory imagery and performance of a ‘Musical IQ’ game, which evaluated a range of meta- musical abilities including mistuning perception, beat perception, and melodic discrimination; and a ‘Tone Scramble’ game, which involved identifying rapidly presented scrambled arpeggios as either major or minor sequences. Among participants reporting low auditory imagery ability (i.e. anauralics), a dissociation was observed between, on the one hand, self-reports of very poor musical ability and lack of engagement with music and on the other hand, largely unimpaired musical perception, reflected in objectively assessed performance of the ‘musical IQ’ tasks. Hence, participants who experience anauralia view themselves as having very poor musical ability, reporting difficulty with sensorimotor skills such as singing, tapping in time or playing an instrument. Despite this perception, however, anauralia is not associated with deficits in the ability to perceive the pitch, rhythm or melody of musical stimuli, when assessed directly.