Abstract
Listening to samba percussion often elicits feelings of pleasure and the desire to move with the beat—an experience sometimes referred to as “feeling the groove”- as well as social connectedness. Here we investigated the effects of performance timing in a Brazilian samba percussion ensemble on listeners’ experienced pleasantness and the desire to move/dance in a behavioral experiment, as well as on neural processing as assessed via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Participants listened to different excerpts of samba percussion produced by multiple instruments that either were “in sync”, with no additional asynchrony between instrumental parts other than what is usual in naturalistic recordings, or were presented “out of sync” by delaying the snare drums (by 28, 55, or 83 ms). Results of the behavioral experiment showed increasing pleasantness and desire to move/dance with increasing synchrony between instruments. Analysis of hemodynamic responses revealed stronger bilateral brain activity in the supplementary motor area, the left premotor area, and the left middle frontal gyrus with increasing synchrony between instruments. Listening to “in sync” percussion thus strengthens audio-motor interactions by recruiting motor-related brain areas involved in rhythm processing and beat perception to a higher degree. Such motor related activity may form the basis for “feeling the groove” and the associated desire to move to music. Furthermore, in an exploratory analysis we found that participants who reported stronger emotional responses to samba percussion in everyday life showed higher activity in the subgenual cingulate cortex, an area involved in prosocial emotions, social group identification and social bonding.
Highlights
Imagine yourself among a hundred head strong percussion section of a samba school during a carnival parade in Brazil: you and the people around you are singing, dancing, and ecstatically happy, and you have goose bumps all over while feeling a close connection with the people around you. What causes such strong emotional engagement, feelings of pleasure, and an irresistible urge to Varying Synchrony in Samba Percussion Sounds move along when listening to beating drums? The desire to move and dance with music, especially with highly rhythmic music, together with the experience of feeling pleasure has been described as “feeling the groove” (Madison, 2006; Madison et al, 2011; Janata et al, 2012)
In a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we investigated the effects of varying degrees of synchrony between multiple instrumental parts on experienced pleasantness and its neural processing while amateur musicians listened to samba percussion
Behavioral Effects of Varying Synchrony in Samba Percussion and Sound Intensity. We show in both the behavioral study and the behavioral measures of the fMRI experiment that individuals who are familiar with the rhythm of samba percussion music were sensitive to our objective manipulation of synchrony between instrumental parts, which was in a range (28–83 ms) that corresponds to asynchronies commonly observed in ensemble performance (Keller, 2014)
Summary
Imagine yourself among a hundred head strong percussion section of a samba school during a carnival parade in Brazil: you and the people around you are singing, dancing, and ecstatically happy, and you have goose bumps all over while feeling a close connection with the people around you. Studies of groove induction have consistently highlighted the impact of rhythm-related factors that increase the amount of temporal information and influence musical expectations These factors include beat salience (i.e., the degree to which the perception of a periodic beat is encouraged by the rhythmic patterning of sound events), the relative magnitude of periodic sound events at metrical levels faster than the beat, the density of sound events between beats, and higher-order characteristics of rhythms like syncopation (a shift of rhythmic emphasis from metrically strong to metrically weak beats; Madison et al, 2011; Madison and Sioros, 2014; Witek et al, 2014). Higher order factors such as syncopation have been found to have an inverted U-shaped relation, with highest groove ratings for medium levels of rhythmic complexity (Witek et al, 2014; Matthews et al, 2019, 2020)
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