Music psychology defines groove as humans’ pleasureable urge to move their body in synchrony with music. Past research has found that rhythmic syncopation, event density, beat salience, and rhythmic variability are positively associated with groove. This exploratory study investigates the groove effect of 248 reconstructed drum patterns from different popular music styles (pop, rock, funk, heavy metal, rock’n’roll, hip hop, soul, R&B). It aims at identifying factors that might be relevant for groove and worth investigating in a controlled setting in the future. Drum patterns of eight bars duration, chosen from 248 popular music tracks, have been transcribed and audio reconstructions have been created on the basis of sound samples. During an online listening experiment, 665 participants rated the reconstructions a total of 8,329 times using a groove questionnaire. Results show that, among 15 tested variables, syncopation (R2 = 0.010) and event density (R2 = 0.011) were positively associated with the groove ratings. These effects were stronger in participants who were music professionals, compared to amateur musicians or mere listeners. A categorisation of the stimuli according to structural aspects was also associated with groove (R2 = 0.018). Beat salience, residual microtiming and rhythmic variability showed no effect on the groove ratings. Participants’ familiarity with a drum pattern had a positive influence on the groove ratings (η2 = 0.051). The largest isolated effect was measured for participants’ style bias (R2 = 0.123): groove ratings tended to be high if participants had the impression that the drum pattern belonged to a style they liked. Combined, the effects of style bias and familiarity (R2 = 0.152) exceeded the other effects as predictors for groove by a wide margin. We conclude that listeners’ taste, musical biographies and expertise have a strong effect on their groove experience. This motivates groove research not to focus on the music alone, but to take the listeners into account as well.

Groove is a common experience in music listeners, often described as an enjoyable impulse to move in synchrony with the music. Research has suggested that the groove experience is influenced by listeners’ musical taste and their familiarity with a musical repertoire. This study reports the results from an online listening experiment in which 233 participants rated the groove quality of 208 short clips from different Western popular music styles. Findings show that participants’ familiarity with a song, its musical style, and listeners’ preference for that style have a considerable effect on the groove experience. Overall, pop and funk stimuli triggered a stronger groove experience than rock stimuli. Listeners had a tendency to give high groove ratings to music they had heard before and to music that belonged to a style they liked. Results also show that professional musicians had a tendency to experience more groove in response to funk compared to pop music, whereas non-musicians experienced more groove with pop compared to funk. Together, these effects explained approximately 15% of the groove ratings’ variance. In sum, listeners’ attitudes and their musical backgrounds have a considerable impact on their experience of groove.

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Music often triggers a pleasurable urge in listeners to move their bodies in response to the rhythm. In music psychology, this experience is commonly referred to as groove. This study presents the Experience of Groove Questionnaire, a newly developed self-report questionnaire that enables respondents to subjectively assess how strongly they feel an urge to move and pleasure while listening to music. The development of the questionnaire was carried out in several stages: candidate questionnaire items were generated on the basis of the groove literature, and their suitability was judged by fifteen groove and rhythm research experts. Two listening experiments were carried out in order to reduce the number of items, to validate the instrument, and to estimate its reliability. The final questionnaire consists of two scales with three items each that reliably measure respondents’ urge to move (Cronbach’s α = .92) and their experience of pleasure (α = .97) while listening to music. The two scales are highly correlated (r = .80), which indicates a strong association between motor and emotional responses to music. The scales of the Experience of Groove Questionnaire can independently be applied in groove research and in a variety of other research contexts in which listeners’ subjective experience of music-induced movement and enjoyment need to be addressed: for example the study of the interaction between music and motivation in sports and research on therapeutic applications of music in people with neurological movement disorders.

In music psychology, the experience of wanting to move in response to music is commonly known as feeling the groove. According to the psychological model of musical groove by Senn et al., the causes for the urge to move are linked to the properties of the music itself, to the personal background of the listener, to the listening situation, and to feedback loops between body movement and cognition. The model formulates eight hypotheses stating that the music affects a listener's urge to move mediated through a variety of cognitive processes. This study develops a method based on structural equation modeling (SEM) to empirically test the model hypotheses. It evaluates five of the model hypotheses using data from an online listening experiment with 135 participants and 16 stylistically diverse musical stimuli (n = 2,160 observations). The SEM model had a good fit with the data (CFI = 0.958, RMSEA = 0.051) and explained a large proportion of the variance in the latent urge to move variable (R 2 = .737). Results show that music affects the urge to move mediated through listeners' experiences of energetic arousal, listening pleasure, and temporal regularity. The stimuli themselves showed direct effects on the urge to move that were not mediated through the hypothesized mediation pathways. This suggests that the model is incomplete. The current study demonstrates that the mediation structure of the psychological groove model can successfully be implemented using an SEM approach. The methodology may be adapted to investigate different repertoires, populations, and hypotheses in the future. Public Significance StatementMusic has the wonderful capacity to motivate body movement in humans. This study presents an empirical validation of a psychological model that aims at explaining how music makes us dance.