The highly rewarding experience of electronic music persists throughout our daily
lives. Our immediate environments are replete with events that emit sounds that are
extremely complex. Electronic music engages with the listening habits we take for
granted in our everyday lives, and reveals how intricate they can be. Inspired by
such intricacies, I have conducted a series of listening experiments with 80
participants over the course of three years to explore the cognition of electronic
music. In this article, I will first present the method and the results of this
experiment, including a categorical analysis of mental associations evoked by
different works of electronic music. Next, I will offer a discussion of narrativity
in electronic music supported by these results and diverse perspectives on
narrativity from a number of disciplines. I will then construct a definition of
gestures as narrative units in electronic music in relation to events in the
environment. In doing so, I will bring together various theories on electronic music
with not only the findings of the current study but also existing research on
auditory cognition.