“We think that it’s near universal,” said Takahide Etani, a medical resident at Japanese Red Cross Ashikaga Hospital who co-wrote a 2024 review on neuroscience and psychological research into groove. Etani said many other countries have words capturing a similar idea, such as “nori” in Japanese, “balanço” in Brazilian Portuguese and “svängig” in Swedish.
Psychological and neuroscience research suggests that the phenomenon of groove reveals something fundamental about how our brains work: We enjoy trying to predict how the music will go, and we move to help us make that prediction.
When the musical rhythm is not completely predictable, it invites us to move and “fill in the beat,” said Maria Witek, an associate professor of music at Britain’s University of Birmingham who researches music cognition. “The music requires us to move to be complete, in a sense.”
The power of groove is that “it makes music this distributed process that we actively take part in and kind of blurs the boundary between music and body and mind,” she said.
Groove-y music is just unpredictable enough
The term “groove” was historically tied to music of the African American and Cuban diaspora, said Tomas Matthews, a postdoctoral researcher of clinical medicine at Aarhus University’s Center for Music in the Brain. Examples of “groove-based music” genres include funk, hip-hop, jazz and Afro-Cuban music. Musicians also use groove in a larger context, such as describing a rhythmic part or feeling interlocked as a group when playing. Scientists, though, use the term more narrowly to mean the pleasurable urge to move to music.
But not all music gets us moving. One key musical element appears to be rhythmic complexity.
Research has consistently reported an inverted-U relationship between subjective reports of groove and syncopation — interruptions of the music’s regular time signature, and an element of rhythmic complexity.
People tend to find music that is moderately complex in rhythm elicits more feelings of groove than music with a low- or high-complexity rhythm.
There seems to be a Goldilocks zone for music’s predictability and complexity: Too little complexity, and it is boring — no need to predict anything. Too much complexity, and it is too difficult — we can’t make sense of what we are listening to, let alone predict what comes next.
“We need some regularity in order to be able to move along, but if it’s too irregular, then we’re not able to even predict where the beat is,” Witek said.
Researchers theorize that one of the brain’s main functions is to predict what the world will throw at us and compare it with what actually happens.
If something does not align with the brain’s prediction, such as unexpected syncopation in a song, we get a prediction error.
“The idea is that we have this sort of fundamental drive to minimize prediction errors,” Matthews said. Being able to make accurate predictions of the world increases survival, he said.
The reason we tend to groove to music instead of, say, the sounds of a babbling brook or a lecture, is that music has more predictable patterns than the sounds of nature or human speech. Music has a time signature that we can predict, but the notes in the song may deviate from it, adding to its complexity and difficulty in predicting.
Moving to music — whether it’s clapping our hands, bobbing our head or dancing — is a way of adding a new sensory input that can minimize the prediction error by reinforcing the underlying musical time signature.
But with just the right amount of complexity, trying to figure out what comes next becomes enjoyable.
“We like a challenge,” said Matthews, who theorizes in a recent paper that the process of minimizing prediction errors in music is intrinsically rewarding. “We’re drawn to something that is challenging and isn’t just perfectly regular.”
What a grooving brain looks like
Sounds that are groove-y cause the brain to respond differently.
In a 2020 neuroimaging study, Matthews, Witek and their colleagues had 54 subjects listen to musical sequences of piano chords of medium or high rhythmic complexity and looked at how brain activity changed in response.
The subjects reported experiencing stronger sensations of groove to medium complexity. In the brain scans, how pleasurable the subjects rated the sounds was correlated to activity in the ventral striatum, which receives dopamine and is important for reward and motivation-related behavior.
The researchers also found more neural activity in areas of the brain involved with movement or movement timing, including the premotor area, basal ganglia and supplementary motor area. Notably, these brain areas still lit up under the brain scanner even without the subjects moving and were related to their self-reported urge to move.
There’s a “privileged connection” between the brain’s auditory system and motor system for controlling movement for timing, Matthews said.
In a 2018 study, Etani and his colleagues reported that the optimal tempo for eliciting groove is around 107 to 126 beats per minute. Interestingly, this tempo is similar to what DJs tend to play at musical events and is akin to our preferred walking speed of about two steps a second, Etani said.
Intriguingly, the vestibular system, which is what senses balance, may also be crucial to groove.
One 2022 study monitored people attending an electronic music concert. During the show, the researchers would periodically switch on a very low-frequency bass sound that people cannot consciously hear but can be processed by the vestibular system. They found evidence that the deep bass in dance music may be a key to making people, well, dance: When the low frequency bass was on, participants moved on average 11.8 percent more.
Music builds bonds and blurs boundaries
Music is often a communal experience and one that brings people together.
Groove may help us synchronize not only our brains and bodies to the music, but also to one another.
“I think the social bonding effect of music is related to the sensation or experience of groove,” Etani said.
People listen to the same music move together, and research has shown that synchrony between people predicts how similar they feel they are and prosocial behavior. In this way, music may serve an important role in strengthening social bonds.
If we are all moving to the same drummer, that boundary between “you and the music and the people around you gets blurred,” Witek said.
Do you have a question about human behavior or neuroscience? Email [email protected] and we may answer it in a future column.
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