Syncopation affects free body-movement in musical groove

Abstract

One of the most immediate and overt ways in which people respond to music is by moving their bodies to the beat. However, the extent to which the rhythmic complexity of groove-specifically its syncopation-contributes to how people spontaneously move to music is largely unexplored. Here, we measured free movements in hand and torso while participants listened to drum-breaks with various degrees of syncopation. We found that drum-breaks with medium degrees of syncopation were associated with the same amount of acceleration and synchronisation as low degrees of syncopation. Participants who enjoyed dancing made more complex movements than those who did not enjoy dancing. While for all participants hand movements accelerated more and were more complex, torso movements were more synchronised to the beat. Overall, movements were mostly synchronised to the main beat and half-beat level, depending on the body-part. We demonstrate that while people do not move or synchronise much to rhythms with high syncopation when dancing spontaneously to music, the relationship between rhythmic complexity and synchronisation is less linear than in simple finger-tapping studies.

Now you hear it: a predictive coding model for understanding rhythmic incongruity

“…Importantly, this reasoning is dependent on a linearly decreasing relationship between meter perception and syncopation, as schematically shown in the middle panel of Figure . This relation is partly supported by the decrease in synchronization in response to increase in syncopation found in Witek et al .’s motion capture study . Here, the results suggested a broken metrical model for the highest levels of syncopation.…”

“…The pleasurable sensation of wanting to move to highly repetitive syncopated rhythms was investigated by Witek and colleagues in a series of studies . Using a battery of 50 groove‐based drum patterns, they asked participants in an online survey to rate the patterns on a 7‐point Likert scale as to how much they wanted to move and the pleasure felt.…”

“…The syncopation in a given musical rhythm can be calculated directly from the musical score, demonstrated, for example, by Longuet-Higgins and Lee's formulation or Witek and colleagues' adjusted formulation. 19 The precision (metrical uncertainty) can be behaviorally estimated by measuring participants' sensorimotor synchronization to the beat using finger-tapping paradigms 20,21 or motion capture 22,23 or by neurophysiological measures. 24,26 In the following, we show how PC in general and the PCRI model in particular can help to explain experimental observations concerning musical rhythm and meter.…”

“…69 The pleasurable sensation of wanting to move to highly repetitive syncopated rhythms was investigated by Witek and colleagues in a series of studies. 22,66,70 Using a battery of 50 groove-based (often) flexible, allowing for expressive timing. (B) In jazz music, the tempo is kept relatively constant, but the rhythm section will constantly vary the degree of tension between the rhythms and the meter using single (*) or multiple syncopations and polyrhythms (**).…”

Comment on Solberg and Jensenius: The Temporal Dynamics of Embodied Pleasure in Music

“…The authors acknowledge that there is a kind of continuous pleasure associated with such music, and that it has been attributed to the perception-action loop resulting from synchronizing body-movements to a regular beat. In particular, research into musical groove has begun to address the relationship between rhythmic structures, sensorimotor synchronization and pleasure (Janata, Tomic, & Haberman, 2012;Witek, Clarke, Wallentin, Kringelbach, & Vuust, 2014;Witek et al, 2016). However, there is a lack of understanding of how the perception-action interaction underlying synchronized movements to rhythmic and repetitive music relates to pleasure.…”