A text mining approach to the use of "groove" in everyday language

Abstract

When speaking about music, the term groove can refer to objective qualities, such as specific rhythmical patterns in certain genres, or to subjective experiences, such as the pleasurable urge to move to the music. The mere juxtaposition of objective musical causes and subjective psychological effects may, however, be too simplistic to fully capture the complex and multifaceted groove phenomenon. One way to broaden the perspective of groove research is to analyze how people use the term groove in everyday language. We therefore employed a text-mining approach with theme searches and sentiment analyses of 970,220 comments on 155 music videos on YouTube. The corresponding songs were previously rated on groove, operationalized as pleasurable urge to move (Senn et al., 2021, Musicae Scientiae, 25). Results show that groove terms were more likely to be used in comments on songs that received higher groove ratings, indicating that the use of groove in everyday language and experiencing an urge to move are positively related. Resonating with the definition of groove as pleasurable urge to move, groove terms were very likely to co-occur with movement terms, and comments mentioning groove expressed more positive sentiments. We also found that groove terms were predominantly used to describe objective musical qualities in comments on funk, soul, and R&B songs, suggesting that the use of groove is related to genre. In general, we demonstrate how text mining can be used to review existing definitions and gain new perspectives on current topics in music science.