Abstract
Rhythmic music often leads to an urge to move the body in time with the music. This urge to move can be a pleasurable experience. In psychology, we define the pleasurable wanting to move to music as groove. Here, we investigate where in the body these two groove components—movement and pleasure—are felt and whether the embodied sensations depend on the musical genre. Using a body sensation map paradigm, we found that the funk genre, which elicited high levels of groove, increased sensations across the whole body, including in the head, shoulders, upper chest, abdomen, arms, hands, hips, legs, and feet. Importantly, wanting to move and pleasure produced distinct body maps, with wanting to move associated with more sensation in the extremities and pleasure more associated with feelings in the chest and abdomen. Exploratory analyses also found an inverted U-shaped relationship between wanting to move and pleasure ratings and the rhythmic complexity of the excerpts, as indexed by pulse entropy, and that medium pulse entropy produced sensations in the upper chest, shoulders, hips, and ankles. The results are discussed in relation to theories of embodied predictive processing, highlighting the potential role of interoception in musical prediction and reward. Overall, our study shows clear patterns of embodied differentiation for different components and levels of groove.
Bio
Maria Witek is professor of Music Psychology at the University of Birmingham. Her main interest is in researching the psychology, cognitive science and cognitive philosophy of musical experience, with a focus on rhythm, timing, emotion and body-movement. Much of her work is centred on trying to understand how dance music experiences and practices emerge from interactions between embodied, neural, musical and social processes. To date, she has focused primarily on the study of groove – the pleasurable experience of wanting to move to music. More recently, she is studying the cognitive mechanisms underlying rhythmic skill in DJing as well as the social and embodied experiences of disabled and neurodiverse DJs. She uses research methods from across experimental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, qualitative social psychology, participatory action research, digital music analysis and phenomenology.