Understanding the Relationship Between Catchiness and Groove

Abstract

Groove and catchiness are central properties of popular music that frequently appear together. Yet, a possible relationship has neither been postulated nor examined. In music psychology, groove is commonly understood as a pleasurable urge to move. Catchiness is often tied to the memorability of music, but it is less researched, and definitions are elusive. In this study, we conducted stimuli-guided expert interviews with popular music creators to unveil their understandings of groove and catchiness based on their experiential, practical, and artistic knowledge. These insights allowed us to expand the ontologies of groove and catchiness. We found that groove consists of a bodily experience and positive affect, with participation, immersion and social aspects playing a part as well. We propose catchiness as a multi-dimensional quality that depends on the listener’s perception and experience of music, in which memorization and positive affect are central, and engagement, immediacy, and clarity are other aspects. We found considerable overlap in groove- and catchiness-promoting structures, and hypothesize that they positively interact and support each other, with some exceptions. The perspective of music creators, our detailed discussion of the ontologies, and the hypothesized relationship can broaden the psychological concepts, help with the explanation of previous, and inspire future research.

The perceived catchiness of music affects the experience of groove

“…The Pleasure scale includes other affective phenomena—good mood and liking. Hence, it covers a broad part of the positive affect discussed in Bechtold et al [ 59 ]. In previous studies, these two scales were strongly correlated [ 61 , 62 ].…”

“…Previously, we explored a possible relationship between groove and catchiness using in-depth expert interviews with music creators, examining how they conceptualize, relate, and employ the two concepts in theory and practice [ 59 ]. The results suggested that musicians think of groove as a bodily experience coupled with positive affect, participation, immersion, and social aspects.…”

“…In the present study, we employed quantitative methods to examine the qualitative findings and theories in Bechtold et al [ 59 ]. More precisely, we investigated the relationship between PLUMM and catchiness with four hypotheses:…”

A text mining approach to the use of “groove” in everyday language

“…"The groove depends on the precision of timing" is one of the most endorsed statements in Janata et al (2012). Among musicians, the timing topic is crucial to groove (Bechtold et al, 2023) and microtiming is an often-discussed factor for the groove experience (e.g., Câmara & Danielsen, 2020;Keil, 1995;Senn et al, 2016).…”

“…A previous study used free-form interview data to show that the term groove is used in a nuanced and multifaceted way by listeners (Hosken, 2020). An expert interview study showed that musicians working in popular music use groove for describing musical objects and subjective experiences alike, and that they do so with high interindividual consistency (Bechtold et al, 2023). Besides these two interview studies, semantic work on how the term groove is used in spontaneous reactions to music is scarce.…”