Review of empirical research into musical grooves [Born to Groove]

I just got off the phone with Charlie Keil. He told me about a recent review of the empirical literature on the groove: Takahide Etani, Akito Miura, Satoshi Kawase, Shinya Fujii, Peter E. Keller, Peter Vuust, Kazutoshi Kudo, A review of psychological and neuroscientific research on musical groove, Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, Volume 158, 2024,105522, ISSN 0149-7634, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2023.105522.

Highlights:

• Moving the body to music is an activity that is universal and ancient.
  
• The pleasurable sensation of wanting to move to music is called groove.
  
• We review work on related musical features and psycho-neurophysiological processes.
  
• Open questions and future directions in empirical groove research are discussed.

Abstract: When listening to music, we naturally move our bodies rhythmically to the beat, which can be pleasurable and difficult to resist. This pleasurable sensation of wanting to move the body to music has been called "groove." Following pioneering humanities research, psychological and neuroscientific studies have provided insights on associated musical features, behavioral responses, phenomenological aspects, and brain structural and functional correlates of the groove experience. Groove research has advanced the field of music science and more generally informed our understanding of bidirectional links between perception and action, and the role of the motor system in prediction. Activity in motor and reward-related brain networks during music listening is associated with the groove experience, and this neural activity is linked to temporal prediction and learning. This article reviews research on groove as a psychological phenomenon with neurophysiological correlates that link musical rhythm perception, sensorimotor prediction, and reward processing. Promising future research directions range from elucidating specific neural mechanisms to exploring clinical applications and socio-cultural implications of groove.

I've been reading around in the article. It's a real head-twister. That is to say, it's dense with information which is difficult to integrate into a coherent overall picture. I keep wishing I could hear the musical examples being talked about. I'll be the authors of the article would have liked that as well. Some examples involve just drums, others just a piano, others some kind of ensemble; but this is just a review article, so the authors aren't listening to those examples.

In view of Charlie's interest in participatory discrepancies (PDs), this next summary paragraph seems particularly pertinent, though the author's don't use Charlie's term. They write of microtiming, where PDs would be a kind of microtiming:

In summary, the studies that have been conducted on the relation- ship between the groove experience and microtiming except one (Nelias et al., 2022) suggest that microtiming is not necessarily an important factor for eliciting the groove experience, while there are conditions of microtiming (i.e., small microtiming) that are comparable to quantized rhythms. However, it is important to note that microtiming has positive effects on rhythmic behaviors such as stabilizing sensorimotor syn- chronization to rhythmic stimuli (Hove et al., 2007) and enhancing the degree of synchronization of body movement to music when dancing (Kilchenmann and Senn, 2015). These results suggest that microtiming is not necessarily systematically related to deliberate conscious aspects of communicating the groove experience, but it might be relevant to the effects of the music on movement induction and stabilizing sensorimotor synchronization. Further research is necessary to elucidate how and under what conditions microtiming could contribute to eliciting the groove experience. In addition, musicians have been insistent about how important microtiming is for the groove experience and the feel of the music (e.g., Berliner, 1994, p. 151–152), so there is a discrepancy between practitioners’ opinions and what research has found. To date, manipulations in research on relations between microtiming and the groove experience have involved displacing events in time without changing the properties of the sounds. However, recent studies have found that microtiming displacements are also associated with changes in timbre, dynamics, and attack times (Danielsen et al., 2019; Caˆmara et al., 2020a; Caˆmara et al., 2020b). This highlights the need to take into account these aspects when investigating the relationship between microtiming and the groove experience in the future.

Read that whole paragraph with care. Note, in particular, the discrepancy "between practitioners’ opinions and what research has found." Practitioners (of anything, not just music) don't always know what they are in fact doing, especially when much of what they are doing is largely intuitive and preconscious. But the research is far from conclusive on its own terms. That is to say, there's more work to be done. Skipping over a lot of stuff I find:

These results indicate that the average groove experience also differs among musical styles. In particular, music belonging to African-American music, such as soul, R&B, funk, and jazz, seems to receive high groove ratings in general. This may be because music belonging to African-American music is typically characterized by drum patterns with a moderate degree of syncopation, as well as a moderate tempo around 120 bpm. Although less is known about the groove experience in other musical styles, it may be relatively consistent and present in concentrated form in African-American music.

Yep. Not surprised. But the part about 120 bpm is new; that's roughly double an average heart rate.

There's much more in the article and I'm far from done with it. But let's look at a couple of concrete examples of the power of the groove. While the whole video has some value in the "slice of family life" category, I'm interested in what happens about about 7:35. A little guy – between 18 months and two years I'd guess – is listening to music on a smart phone.

Watch him start moving to the beat. My guess is that it's not a matter of active willing. He just does it. He can't help himself. The way I read it, mom notices his movement, he notices mom's attention and utters, "Whoa!" Mom answers in kind, and then he stops grooving and starts walking. I want to know the microtimings involved in that, but the meso-timings as well. How long after he starts listening does his body start to move? Notice that he moves from the hips. Is he in synch from the start? How closely? Etc.

On a different tip, be amazed by the young bass virtuoso, Mohini Day, playing Coltrane's solo on "Countdown." LOL!

 

Propulsive as hell. But a groove? Yes? No? Maybe? Sorta'? How's it work? How'd Coltrane get from "walking the bar" with RnB bands in Philly 1954 – hardcore groove music, though playing with Dizzy Gillespie to THAT?