Hot Topics and Frontier Evolution in Music Research within the Multimodal Art Context: A Bibliometric Analysis Based on CiteSpace

Driven by rapid advances in digital media technologies, immersive interactive systems, and intelligent algorithms, music research has increasingly shifted from a single-discipline, auditory-centered paradigm toward a convergent and interdisciplinary research domain integrating musicology, digital media, cognitive science, and human–computer interaction. Although studies on immersive experience, music education, and music therapy have proliferated under this multimodal artistic context, the overall intellectual structure and evolutionary dynamics of the field remain insufficiently mapped. To address this gap, this study conducts a systematic bibliometric and knowledge-graph analysis of multimodal music research using 1,435 articles published between 2000 and 2025 in the Web of Science Core Collection. CiteSpace is employed to examine annual publication trends, national and institutional collaboration networks, high-frequency keywords, thematic clusters, and burst patterns. The results reveal a clear evolutionary trajectory, with research foci shifting from perceptual mechanisms and computational modeling toward interaction-oriented and application-driven inquiry, and most recently converging on immersive and intelligent directions. Co-word and clustering analyses indicate that the field is organized around three tightly interconnected themes: technological systems, experiential and perceptual mechanisms, and applied contexts such as education and therapy. Collaboration-network analysis further demonstrates that knowledge production in this domain is driven by interdisciplinary and cross-regional synergy, with high-centrality countries and institutions acting as key hubs for convergent research activities and cross-domain knowledge integration. By delineating the macro-level knowledge structure and developmental trends of multimodal music research, this study provides systematic evidence for understanding the ongoing paradigm shift in the field and offers a reference framework for future topic selection and methodological design.