Groove and catchiness are central properties of popular music that frequently appear together. Yet, a possible relationship has neither been postulated nor examined. In music psychology, groove is commonly understood as a pleasurable urge to move. Catchiness is often tied to the memorability of music, but it is less researched, and definitions are elusive. In this study, we conducted stimuli-guided expert interviews with popular music creators to unveil their understandings of groove and catchiness based on their experiential, practical, and artistic knowledge. These insights allowed us to expand the ontologies of groove and catchiness. We found that groove consists of a bodily experience and positive affect, with participation, immersion and social aspects playing a part as well. We propose catchiness as a multi-dimensional quality that depends on the listener’s perception and experience of music, in which memorization and positive affect are central, and engagement, immediacy, and clarity are other aspects. We found considerable overlap in groove- and catchiness-promoting structures, and hypothesize that they positively interact and support each other, with some exceptions. The perspective of music creators, our detailed discussion of the ontologies, and the hypothesized relationship can broaden the psychological concepts, help with the explanation of previous, and inspire future research.

The blues is a complex and subtle musical language that warrants careful analysis and sustained debate. There are legitimate concerns with the application of music-theoretical paradigms to blues music, but we should not allow such concerns to undermine all attempts to address the blues as a serious and coherently structured music. This paper explores the notions of ladder, level and chromatic cycle as an insightful set of theoretical tools in analysing the music of Robert Johnson. Key sources in developing this analytical approach are the scholarship of Gerhard Kubik and the spatially oriented analytical methods of neo-Riemannian theory. The notions of ladder, level and chromatic cycle are explored with close reference to Johnson's 'Kindhearted Woman' and through a more general consideration of the scale-degree content of his vocal parts.

The music of Muddy Waters is steeped in the blues tradition of the early twentieth century but also plays a key role in the development of the rock music of the 1960s and '70s. The importance of Waters's music can be understood more fully by exploring its engagement with blues music's harmonic and melodic characteristics. This article posits two approaches to blues tonal space: the networked and the laddered. The first is underpinned by the cyclical potential of equal temperament and is characterised by descending chromatic motions. The second is underpinned by the harmonic series and is characterised by the microtonal shaping of pitch content within the framework of a ladder that approximates an equal-tempered major-minor seventh chord.After explaining the details of these approaches with reference to an early blues recording by Alberta Hunter and Fats Waller, the article examines the ways in which Muddy Waters favours the laddered approach but develops novel ways of referencing the networked system, often combining or synergising aspects of each. This analysis yields insight into the potential for interchange in blues between networked and laddered tonal space. This interchange exploits (1) the structural importance of the major-minor seventh chord, (2) the special weight afforded the sonority of the minor third and (3) the affinity between microtonal and chromatic step motion in this genre.

Peircean semiotics has retained a place in the study of music for more than 40 years. Few studies, however, have focused upon arguably the most important aspects of Peirce's thought: his contribution to logic and his development of a pragmatic approach to epistemology. This article develops a theory of Peircean semiotics in music that is rigorously derived from the key insights Peirce offered to philosophy. It focuses upon his theory of the proposition and posits an approach to music analysis that is sensitive to the importance of music's internal structure while recognizing the enormously significant role played by cultural contexts and social forces in the development of musical meanings. The article introduces Peircean semiotics and develops a theory of musical valency with particular reference to the Allegro of Mozart's ‘Prague’ Symphony. It concludes by theorizing the role of cultural and ideological forces in articulating and saturating a music's valency.

This paper presents a method for representing trees using constraint logic programming over finite domains. We describe a class of trees that is of particular interest to us and how we can represent the set of trees belonging to that class using constraints. The method enables the specification of a set of trees without having to generate all of the members of the set. This allows us to reason about sets of trees that would normally be too large to use. We present this research in the context of a system to generate expressive musical performances and, in particular, how this method can be used to represent musical structure.