Abstract
Music can evoke powerful, positive, and meaningful experiences, but how does its potential to evoke such experiences come about? Listening to the music itself is critical, but referents (the thoughts, ideas, events, and affects associated with the music) are also relevant. We found a lack of understanding in the literature regarding the processes through which music evokes meaning through referents. To address this lacuna, we built on modern conceptions of framing theory. The following four framing processes were proposed, with each acting on different time scales (shortest [S] to longest [L]), and with an increasingly top-down [T] influence: (1) fluency [S]-the ease with which the accompanying information (about the music) can be mentally processed, with easy-to-process material leading to 'increased preference/positive evaluation of the music' [IPPE]; (2) facilitation-the content of the messaging directly influences IPPE, for example, when referring to the beauty of the music or the talent of the composer; (3) affiliation-when social influences imbue the music with meaning; and (4) fit [L, T]-when the other processes lead to long-term personal and cultural IPPE through norms and habits. Together, these processes can be applied to provide a comprehensive account of how musical meaning and preferences are developed. Three case studies show how these processes can be applied to the extant literature: why negatively framed music only has a relatively small (negative) impact on IPPE; why adding crowd sounds to recorded music only has a small effect; and how 'labels' such as Beethoven and Mozart become established and then impose top-down influence on music's meaning.