Drawing on research from her Music Cognition Lab at Princeton, Margulis shows that when we listen to music, our minds don’t just wander randomly. The sound itself actively shapes what we remember and imagine, triggering vivid, sensory-rich experiences and even shared patterns of thought across listeners.
The book is very academic, but also easy to understand. Dr. Margulis does an excellent job of distilling the research into plain language. The book explains why music can trigger memories, generate imagery, and shape our thoughts and emotions. It's an excellent book for anyone who loves music, but also for those who are just casual listeners curious how music shapes their minds.
You can learn more in this Q&A.
What surprised you most as you were researching and writing this book?
I still find it shocking that two separate people in two separate places can listen to an excerpt of music they’ve never heard before and lapse into the same daydream. This discovery was so counterintuitive that we needed to prove and reprove it to ourselves until every last doubt was removed. One of the plotlines in the book covers this journey—all the ways we tried to talk ourselves out of our own finding.
How does your work change the way we think about listening to music in everyday life?
My favorite course evaluation for the large lecture class I teach every spring reads “I’ll never listen to music the same way again.” My work gets underneath some of the most intuitive aspects of music listening, unsettles them, and shows how strange and revealing they actually are. Why can music make you feel like you’re reliving a memory in technicolor detail? Why do you listen again and again to the same song? Why do you automatically feel more connected to someone who loves the same band as you? Transported makes you curious about experiences that you might have taken for granted, seeing them for what they are: windows into your own mind.
What led you to write a book about musical daydreams in the first place?
During my time studying piano at the Peabody Conservatory, I got increasingly restless about the why underneath what I was doing. In an act of brazen rebellion, I defied my piano teacher’s instructions and took a bus to Johns Hopkins to enroll in a class called Minds, Brains, and Computers. Stepping outside the confines of conservatory helped me reconnect to the powerful listening experiences that had first fueled my interest in music, and learning about cognitive science gave me the tools to rigorously study them.
Why do you think this everyday experience has been overlooked by science and culture?
We live in an era of acute anxiety about distraction, every spare moment occupied by a screen, every lapse in attention treated as a failure. Against that backdrop, the idea that a certain kind of mind-wandering is not only normal but genuinely valuable cuts against the grain. It’s easier to dismiss these experiences than to examine them.
There’s also something to the classic observation that fish don’t know they’re in water. Musical daydreams are so woven into everyday experience that we rarely stop to question them. But once you start pointing them out and naming them, you begin to see just how strange and revealing they actually are and to wonder why science wasn’t studying them earlier.
What did you see missing in how we currently understand music and the mind?
When people imagine the cognitive science of music, they usually picture something reductive, like a formula mapping notes to predictable experiential outputs. But music is a stranger window into the mind than that. It bears the traces of every association we’ve accumulated moving through the world, which reveals something important: our minds aren’t individual autonomous processers, but entities fundamentally shaped by experience and community. There’s a suggestive parallel here with large language models, and machine learning is now helping map that associative structure at scales previously deemed impossible. The newest generation of research on music and the mind treats culture and mind not as separate objects of study, but as joint phenomena to be understood together.
If readers take away one new way of thinking about music, what do you hope it is?
Usually, when I tell people what I do, the first thing they say is “Oh, I don’t know anything about music.” No one who reads this book should come away thinking that again. The book details the sophisticated but implicit musical knowledge required to hear one snippet of a song and picture Seattle in the 1990s and hear another and feel silk slipping through your fingers. More than anything, this book will show readers how much they know about music that they didn’t know they knew.
Her work bridges music, psychology, and neuroscience, using experiments and listening studies to track how the brain processes music and how it shapes attention, memory, and emotion. In these studies, participants listen to carefully designed pieces of music while Dr. Margulis measures how they respond, what they remember, how their attention shifts, what they imagine, and how they feel, allowing her to isolate specific elements of music and understand their effects on the mind.
Dr. Margulis is the author of award-winning academic books, including On Repeat: How Music Plays the Mind, which received both the Wallace Berry Award and the ASCAP Deems Taylor/Virgil Thomson Award. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and recognized by the National Academy of Sciences and has been featured in outlets ranging from NPR’s All Things Considered to the BBC.
She has appeared as an expert contributor on Netflix’s Explained, where she explains how music affects the brain and helps translate research on music cognition for a broad audience. Elizabeth served as President of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition from 2017 to 2019, where she helped advance interdisciplinary research and guide the field’s direction. Transported is her first book for general audiences.
She holds a PhD and an MA from Columbia University and a BM from the Peabody Conservatory of Music.
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