A Critical Cross-cultural Study of Sensorimotor and Groove Responses to Syncopation Among Ghanaian and American University Students and Staff

Abstract

The pleasurable desire to move to a beat is known as groove and is partly explained by rhythmic syncopation. While many contemporary groove-directed genres originated in the African diaspora, groove music psychology has almost exclusively studied European or North American listeners. While cross-cultural approaches can help us understand how different populations respond to music, comparing African and Western musical behaviors has historically tended to rely on stereotypes. Here we report on two studies in which sensorimotor and groove responses to syncopation were measured in university students and staff from Cape Coast, Ghana and Williamstown, MA, United States. In our experimental designs and interpretations, we show sensitivity towards the ethical implications of doing cross-cultural research in an African context. The Ghanaian group showed greater synchronization precision than Americans during monophonic syncopated patterns, but this was not reflected in synchronization accuracy. There was no significant group difference in the pleasurable desire to move. Our results have implications for how we understand the relationship between exposure and synchronization, and how we define syncopation in cultural and musical contexts. We hope our critical approach to cross-cultural comparison contributes to developing music psychology into a more inclusive and culturally grounded field.

The complexity‐aesthetics relationship for musical rhythm is more fixed than flexible: Evidence from children and expert dancers

“…(2014) showed that groove ratings have an inverted‐U‐shaped relationship with respect to the amount of syncopation in the rhythm, and that quadratic models (the inverted‐U) better explain listeners’ ratings than do linear models. The inverted‐U relationship between syncopation and groove has been replicated using different stimulus sets and methods (e.g., Matthews et al., 2019; Stupacher et al., 2022; Witek et al., 2020), although some work has failed to observe the inverted‐U relationship (Senn et al., 2018). One possible reason for the discrepancy is differences in the stimuli used: In some of the work demonstrating an inverted‐U (e.g., Witek et al., 2014) the effect may depend on specific rhythms in the stimulus set that are particularly highly syncopated and musically implausible, thus challenging the notion of syncopation (because listeners may not be able to perceive a metrical beat structure for those rhythms), whereas other studies failing to observe an inverted‐U relationship (e.g., Senn et al., 2018) used rhythms that were more musically plausible and limited in syncopation (see Figure S1 for a test of this possibility).…”

Attention affects overall gain but not selective contrast at meter frequencies in the neural processing of rhythm

“…The weak explanatory power of biologically plausible models of subcortical auditory processing to account for our EEG results adds to the evidence that meter perception involves higher-level transformations of the input, providing flexibility within (Repp, 2007;Repp et al, 2008;Chemin et al, 2014;Lenc et al, 2020) and across individuals (McKinney and Moelants, 2006;Martens, 2011;Hannon et al, 2012a;Kalender et al, 2013;Polak et al, 2018;Witek et al, 2020). Instead of offering a mechanistic explanation for the current EEG results, we emphasize the need for more data and powerful designs, in order to thoroughly describe the perceptual phenomenon in question, and how it is shaped by input features, behavioral goals, context, exposure, and learning.…”

Experience of Groove Questionnaire

“…As a consequence, the response patterns of different cultural subgroups could diverge systematically on the factor Urge to Move. Therefore, we share the view of Witek et al (2020) that there is a need for more cross-cultural research on this topic to further our understanding of cultural communalities and differences in the experience of groove. Due to the high internal consistency of the two scales, one could conclude that some items might be redundant for the measurement of Urge to Move and Pleasure.…”