Abstract
Moving to music is an essential human pleasure particularly related to musical groove. Structurally, music associated with groove is often characterised by rhythmic complexity in the form of syncopation, frequently observed in musical styles such as funk, hip-hop and electronic dance music. Structural complexity has been related to positive affect in music more broadly, but the function of syncopation in eliciting pleasure and body-movement in groove is unknown. Here we report results from a web-based survey which investigated the relationship between syncopation and ratings of wanting to move and experienced pleasure. Participants heard funk drum-breaks with varying degrees of syncopation and audio entropy, and rated the extent to which the drum-breaks made them want to move and how much pleasure they experienced. While entropy was found to be a poor predictor of wanting to move and pleasure, the results showed that medium degrees of syncopation elicited the most desire to move and the most pleasure, particularly for participants who enjoy dancing to music. Hence, there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between syncopation, body-movement and pleasure, and syncopation seems to be an important structural factor in embodied and affective responses to groove.
Highlights
What is it about certain kinds of music that makes us want to move, and why does it feel good? Few contexts make the pleasurable effects of music more obvious than the dance club
Since: a) structural complexity is related to positive affect [45,46,48], b) syncopation is a common form of structural complexity in music associated with groove [11,12,13,14], and c) groove elicits a pleasurable drive towards bodymovement [9,10], we investigated the extent to which syncopation can explain the desire to move and feelings of pleasure in groove
Using a web-based rating survey we found an inverted Ushaped relationship between degree of syncopation in drum-breaks and movement- and pleasure-ratings, indicating that intermediate degrees of syncopation elicit the most desire to move and pleasure in music associated with groove
Summary
What is it about certain kinds of music that makes us want to move, and why does it feel good? Few contexts make the pleasurable effects of music more obvious than the dance club. Groove has been described as a musical quality associated with body-movement and dance [7,8,9,10], often occurring in response to musical genres such as funk, soul, hip-hop and electronic dance music. This music is often characterised by syncopation [11,12,13,14]. We investigated the relationship between syncopation in groove rhythms and feelings of wanting to move and pleasure by asking participants to rate their grooverelated experiences via a web-based survey
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