The Pleasurable Urge to Move to Music Through the Lens of Learning Progress

Musical neurodynamics

A great deal of research in the neuroscience of music suggests that neural oscillations synchronize with musical stimuli. Although neural synchronization is a well-studied mechanism underpinning expectation, it has even more far-reaching implications for music. In this Perspective, we survey the literature on the neuroscience of music, including pitch, harmony, melody, tonality, rhythm, metre, groove and affect. We describe how fundamental dynamical principles based on known neural mechanisms can explain basic aspects of music perception and performance, as summarized in neural resonance theory. Building on principles such as resonance, stability, attunement and strong anticipation, we propose that people anticipate musical events not through predictive neural models, but because brain-body dynamics physically embody musical structure. The interaction of certain kinds of sounds with ongoing pattern-forming dynamics results in patterns of perception, action and coordination that we collectively experience as music. Statistically universal structures may have arisen in music because they correspond to stable states of complex, pattern-forming dynamical systems. This analysis of empirical findings from the perspective of neurodynamic principles sheds new light on the neuroscience of music and what makes music powerful.

The pleasurable urge to move to music is unchanged in people with musical anhedonia

In cognitive science, the sensation of "groove" has been defined as the pleasurable urge to move to music. When listeners rate rhythmic stimuli on derived pleasure and urge to move, ratings on these dimensions are highly correlated. However, recent behavioural and brain imaging work has shown that these two components may be separable. To examine this potential separability, our study investigates the sensation of groove in people with specific musical anhedonia. Individuals with musical anhedonia have a blunted ability to derive pleasure from music but can still derive pleasure from other domains (e.g., sex and food). People with musical anhedonia were identified as those with scores in the lower 10% of scores on the Barcelona Musical Reward Questionnaire, but who had no deficits in music perception, no symptoms of depression, average levels of physical and social anhedonia, and sensitivity to punishment and reward. We predicted that if the two components of groove are separable, individuals with musical anhedonia would experience lower levels of derived pleasure but have comparable ratings of wanting to move compared to controls. Groove responses were measured in an online study (N = 148) using a set of experimenter-generated musical stimuli varying in rhythmic and harmonic complexity, which were validated in several previous studies. Surprisingly, we found no significant differences in groove response between individuals with musical anhedonia (n = 17) and a matched control group (n = 17). Mediation analyses for the anhedonia sample found that wanting to move ratings fully mediated the effect of rhythmic and harmonic complexity on pleasure ratings. Taken together, these results indicate that the urge to move may compensate for the blunted pleasure sensation in those with musical anhedonia. More generally, these results suggest that the urge to move is a primary source of pleasure in the groove response.

Null effect of perceived drum pattern complexity on the experience of groove

There is a broad consensus in groove research that the experience of groove, understood as a pleasurable urge to move in response to music, is to some extent related to the complexity of the rhythm. Specifically, music with medium rhythmic complexity has been found to motivate greater urge to move compared to low or high complexity music (inverted-U hypothesis). Studies that confirmed the inverted-U hypothesis usually based their measure of complexity on the rhythmic phenomenon of syncopation, where rhythms with more and/or stronger syncopation are considered to be more complex than less syncopated rhythms. However, syncopation is not the same as complexity and represents only one rhythmic device that makes music complex. This study attempts the verification of the inverted-U hypothesis independently from syncopation. It uses a new stimulus set of forty idiomatic popular music drum patterns whose perceptual complexity was measured experimentally in a previous study. The current study reports the results of a listening experiment with n = 179 participants, in which the inverted-U hypothesis was not confirmed. Complexity did not have any significant effect on listeners' urge to move (p = 834). Results are discussed in the context of the psychological model of musical groove, which offers a nuance to this null result: simple drum patterns motivate listeners to dance because they convey metric clarity; complex patterns invite dancing because they are interesting. Yet, overall, the urge to move does not seem to depend on complexity, at least in the case of idiomatic drum patterns that are typically encountered in the Western popular music repertoire.

The association between liking, learning and creativity in music

Aesthetic preference is intricately linked to learning and creativity. Previous studies have largely examined the perception of novelty in terms of pleasantness and the generation of novelty via creativity separately. The current study examines the connection between perception and generation of novelty in music; specifically, we investigated how pleasantness judgements and brain responses to musical notes of varying probability (estimated by a computational model of auditory expectation) are linked to learning and creativity. To facilitate learning de novo, 40 non-musicians were trained on an unfamiliar artificial music grammar. After learning, participants evaluated the pleasantness of the final notes of melodies, which varied in probability, while their EEG was recorded. They also composed their own musical pieces using the learned grammar which were subsequently assessed by experts. As expected, there was an inverted U-shaped relationship between liking and probability: participants were more likely to rate the notes with intermediate probabilities as pleasant. Further, intermediate probability notes elicited larger N100 and P200 at posterior and frontal sites, respectively, associated with prediction error processing. Crucially, individuals who produced less creative compositions preferred higher probability notes, whereas individuals who composed more creative pieces preferred notes with intermediate probability. Finally, evoked brain responses to note probability were relatively independent of learning and creativity, suggesting that these higher-level processes are not mediated by brain responses related to performance monitoring. Overall, our findings shed light on the relationship between perception and generation of novelty, offering new insights into aesthetic preference and its neural correlates.

Beyond novelty: Learnability in the interplay between creativity, curiosity and artistic endeavours

Using art and aesthetics as context, we explore the notion that curiosity and creativity emanate from a single novelty-seeking mechanism and outline support for the idea. However, we also highlight the importance of learning progress tracking in exploratory action and advocate for a nuanced understanding that aligns novelty-seeking with learnability. This, we argue, offers a more comprehensive framework of how curiosity and creativity are related.

The perceived catchiness of music affects the experience of groove

Catchiness and groove are common phenomena when listening to popular music. Catchiness may be a potential factor for experiencing groove but quantitative evidence for such a relationship is missing. To examine whether and how catchiness influences a key component of groove-the pleasurable urge to move to music (PLUMM)-we conducted a listening experiment with 450 participants and 240 short popular music clips of drum patterns, bass lines or keys/guitar parts. We found four main results: (1) catchiness as measured in a recognition task was only weakly associated with participants' perceived catchiness of music. We showed that perceived catchiness is multi-dimensional, subjective, and strongly associated with pleasure. (2) We found a sizeable positive relationship between PLUMM and perceived catchiness. (3) However, the relationship is complex, as further analysis showed that pleasure suppresses perceived catchiness' effect on the urge to move. (4) We compared common factors that promote perceived catchiness and PLUMM and found that listener-related variables contributed similarly, while the effects of musical content diverged. Overall, our data suggests music perceived as catchy is likely to foster groove experiences.

Oscillatory attention in groove

Attention is not constant but rather fluctuates over time and these attentional fluctuations may prioritize the processing of certain events over others. In music listening, the pleasurable urge to move to music (termed 'groove' by music psychologists) offers a particularly convenient case study of oscillatory attention because it engenders synchronous and oscillatory movements which also vary predictably with stimulus complexity. In this study, we simultaneously recorded pupillometry and scalp electroencephalography (EEG) from participants while they listened to drumbeats of varying complexity that they rated in terms of groove afterwards. Using the intertrial phase coherence of the beat frequency, we found that while subjects were listening, their pupil activity became entrained to the beat of the drumbeats and this entrained attention persisted in the EEG even as subjects imagined the drumbeats continuing through subsequent silent periods. This entrainment in both the pupillometry and EEG worsened with increasing rhythmic complexity, indicating poorer sensory precision as the beat became more obscured. Additionally, sustained pupil dilations revealed the expected, inverted U-shaped relationship between rhythmic complexity and groove ratings. Taken together, this work bridges oscillatory attention to rhythmic complexity in relation to musical groove.