What in Music Makes Us Dance? Recent Developments in Groove Scholarship

This talk is co-sponsored by the UBC Rhythm Research Cluster: Exploring Musical Time

Humans love to synchronize body movement with rhythmic music. Dancing, exercising and even ironing a shirt are much more enjoyable when we carry them out to a good tune. Groove research investigates factors that influence our urge to entrain body movement to music. Researchers ask why many of us would rather dance to Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” than to the Beatles’ “Yesterday,” even though we might appreciate both songs equally from an aesthetic point of view. This presentation explores the phenomenon of groove from an empirical perspective by discussing a recent listening experiment in which participants assessed the entrainment qualities of popular music drum patterns.