Find your groove: a pilot study on the influences of beat salience and social connectedness on groove perception

Abstract

Is beat salience an accurate way to measure groove? Does personal identification with the music affect groove ratings? Weigl (2016) lists 24 17-second clips from Rock/Pop/Electronic Dance Music genres in categories of high, medium, and low beat salience. To determine if beat salience influences groove perception, participants in my pilot study completed a Likert scale for each of Weigl's clips, ranging from "1 = no need to move" to "7 = dance party!"; the results suggest that this phrasing is an effective operationalized proxy for groove and beat salience. Participants also filled out social surveys to see if a propensity towards social connectedness would influence groove perception (GP). There was a weak correlation between GP and feeling connected to the musical environment. This connected feeling was correlated with prior emotional engagement with music. Self-construal as an independent or interdependent person did not have any correlation with GP; this result suggests that the intersection of musical and social elements in groove should focus on the musical environment, rather than self-construal elements.

An SEM approach to validating the psychological model of musical groove.

“…This listener experience might for example be triggered by a regular beat in the music. The hypothesis is supported by empirical results that show a positive relationship between the urge to move and the salience of the regular beat (Engel et al, 2022;Madison et al, 2011;Percival, 2021), and by theoretical studies on the synchronization of music and movement (Merker, 2014;Oliver, 2016). • The model further states that the music needs to evoke timerelated interest (H 2 ) in the listener in order to motivate an urge to move.…”

“…The concrete listening situation (Figure 1, top box) is known to moderate our perception of music and the urge to move. It makes a difference whether we listen to live versus recorded music (Swarbrick et al, 2019), whether we are with people that we feel close to or not (Stupacher et al, 2020), how we interact with each other (Hartmann et al, 2019; Percival, 2021), whether or not we are in a situation where body movement is possible, encouraged or expected (such as a dance party), or how we currently feel (Juslin et al, 2011). Since many empirical studies have been carried out in laboratory or online settings, the listening situation was either kept uniform throughout experiments (laboratory) or experimenters did not have much control over the conditions (online); consequently, many topics in this domain remain unresearched.…”

An SEM Approach to Validating the Psychological Model of Musical Groove

“…This listener experience might for example be triggered by a regular beat in the music. The hypothesis is supported by empirical results that show a positive relationship between the urge to move and the salience of the regular beat (Engel et al, 2022, Madison et al, 2011Percival, 2021), and by theoretical studies on the synchronization of music and movement (Merker, 2014;Oliver, 2016).…”

“…The concrete listening situation (Figure 1, top box) is known to moderate our perception of music and the urge to move. It makes a difference whether we listen to live versus recorded music (Swarbrick et al, 2019), whether we are with people that we feel close to or not (Stupacher et al, 2020), how we interact with each other (Hartmann et al, 2019;Percival, 2021), whether or not we are in a situation where body movement is possible, encouraged or expected (such as a dance party), or how we currently feel (Juslin et al, 2011).…”