What kind of music makes us dance
Groove research investigates which characteristics of a song stimulate people to move their bodies. A team from Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts has now shown that this effect is not just to do with the music alone.
To uncover the secret of the groove, music psychologist Olivier Senn and his team launched an online listening experiment two years ago in which participants evaluated reconstructed drum patterns from 248 songs. The songs came from very different genres. 665 people, mostly from Switzerland and Germany, took part.
The evaluations revealed numerous small rhythmic effects: Professional and amateur musicians reacted positively to complexity, while amateurs were just as keen to move to simple rhythms. However, personal musical taste had a much greater influence: participants rated a drum pattern significantly better if they thought it came from a style they liked or from a song they knew.
As a next step, the Lucerne researchers have revised their groove questionnaire to better distinguish between taste and motor reactions. The new questionnaire is currently being tested as part of a broad-based survey to which everyone is invited.
Link to the survey: http://www.hslu.ch/groove-questionnaire
