Wednesday 16 April 2014

Syncopation, Body-Movement and Pleasure in Groove Music

PLoS ONE 9(4): e94446
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0094446
Published: April 16, 2014

Maria A. G. Witek [1], Eric F. Clarke [1], Mikkel Wallentin [2,3], Morten L. Kringelbach [2,4], Peter Vuust [2,5]

[1] Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
[2] Center of Functionally Integrative Neuroscience, Aarhus University Hospital, Aarhus, Denmark
[3] Center for Semiotics, University of Aarhus, Aarhus, Denmark
[4] Department of Psychiatry, Warneford Hospital, University of Oxford, Oxford, United Kingdom
[5] The Royal Academy of Music, Aarhus/Aalborg, Denmark

Abstract

Moving to music is an essential human pleasure particularly related to musical groove. Structurally, music associated with groove is often characterised by rhythmic complexity in the form of syncopation, frequently observed in musical styles such as funk, hip-hop and electronic dance music. Structural complexity has been related to positive affect in music more broadly, but the function of syncopation in eliciting pleasure and body-movement in groove is unknown.

Here we report results from a web-based survey which investigated the relationship between syncopation and ratings of wanting to move and experienced pleasure. Participants heard funk drum-breaks with varying degrees of syncopation and audio entropy, and rated the extent to which the drum-breaks made them want to move and how much pleasure they experienced.

While entropy was found to be a poor predictor of wanting to move and pleasure, the results showed that medium degrees of syncopation elicited the most desire to move and the most pleasure, particularly for participants who enjoy dancing to music. Hence, there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between syncopation, body-movement and pleasure, and syncopation seems to be an important structural factor in embodied and affective responses to groove.

Copyright: © 2014 Witek et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0094446

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