This study develops three composite psychometric scales for the use in listening experiments acro... more This study develops three composite psychometric scales for the use in listening experiments across music psychology. The new scales measure the following three psychological constructs: (1) Inner representation of temporal regularity: This scale allows listeners to assess to what extent they experience a subjective feeling of temporal regularity and predictability while listening to music. The scale consists of four items, and it measures the underlying construct with good reliability (Cronbach's α = .88). (2) Time-related interest: This scale measures how much listeners feel that the rhythm of the music captures their attention. The scale consists of three items and shows good reliability (α = .85). (3) Energetic arousal: This scale measures how much the listeners feel energized while they are listening to music. The scale uses four items and has excellent reliability (α = .95). The development of the scales was motivated by the psychological model of musical groove in which the three underlying psychological constructs play an important role; the new scales serve to test the model hypotheses. The three scales can also be administered separately and might prove to be useful in research contexts within music psychology that investigate subjective experiences of temporal regularity, interest, or energetic arousal in music listeners.
The study by Lee & Zaryab (this issue) investigated whether listening to high-groove music affect... more The study by Lee & Zaryab (this issue) investigated whether listening to high-groove music affects how heterosexual observers rate the attractiveness of people from the opposite sex. They found a very small positive effect of high-groove music on the male observers, but no effect on females. In my commentary, I argue for a more conservative interpretation of the results than the one offered by the authors.
When speaking about music, the term groove can refer to objective qualities, such as specific rhy... more When speaking about music, the term groove can refer to objective qualities, such as specific rhythmical patterns in certain genres, or to subjective experiences, such as the pleasurable urge to move to the music. The mere juxtaposition of objective musical causes and subjective psychological effects may, however, be too simplistic to fully capture the complex and multifaceted groove phenomenon. One way to broaden the perspective of groove research is to analyze how people use the term groove in everyday language. We therefore employed a text-mining approach with theme searches and sentiment analyses of 970,220 comments on 155 music videos on YouTube. The corresponding songs were previously rated on groove, operationalized as pleasurable urge to move (Senn et al., 2021, Musicae Scientiae, 25). Results show that groove terms were more likely to be used in comments on songs that received higher groove ratings, indicating that the use of groove in everyday language and experiencing an ...
This study presents a method to estimate the complexity of popular music drum patterns based on a... more This study presents a method to estimate the complexity of popular music drum patterns based on a core idea from predictive coding. Specifically, it postulates that the complexity of a drum pattern depends on the quantity of surprisal it causes in the listener. Surprisal, according to predictive coding theory, is a numerical measure that takes large values when the perceiver’s inner model of the surrounding world fails to predict the actual stream of sensory data (i.e. when the perception surprises the perceiver), and low values if model predictions and sensory data agree. The proposed new method first approximates a listener’s inner model of a popular music drum pattern (using ideas on inculturation and a Bayesian learning process). It then quantifies the listener’s surprisal evaluating the discrepancies between the predictions of the inner model and the actual drum pattern. It finally estimates drum pattern complexity from surprisal. The method was optimised and tested using a set...
This study presents an audio stimuli set of forty drum patterns from Western popular music togeth... more This study presents an audio stimuli set of forty drum patterns from Western popular music together with empirical data on the stimuli’s perceived complexity. The audio stimuli are meticulous reconstructions of drum patterns found in commercial recordings; they are based on careful transcriptions (carried out by professional musicians), drum stroke loudness information and exact onset timing measurements. Data on perceived stimulus complexity was collected in a listening experiment using a pairwise comparison design with 220 participants (4400 trials); and complexity measures were calculated using the Bradley-Terry probability model. The drum pattern stimuli and their perceptual complexity estimates can be used for listening experiments in which stimulus complexity is a relevant independent variable; and they allow to assess measures and models of drum pattern complexity.
<p>Mean <i>Groove</i> ratings of all 248 stimuli as a function of <i>Reco... more <p>Mean <i>Groove</i> ratings of all 248 stimuli as a function of <i>Recording Year</i>. Number keys are given in <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0199604#pone.0199604.t003" target="_blank">Table 3</a>.</p
<p>Groove ratings as a function of <i>Syncopation</i> (A), <i>Event Densi... more <p>Groove ratings as a function of <i>Syncopation</i> (A), <i>Event Density</i> (B), <i>Style Bias</i> and <i>Familiarity</i> (C): Small dots denote single observations, large symbols denote the mean <i>Groove</i> ratings of the 248 stimuli. The symbol shapes, colours, and sizes represent the <i>Pattern Category</i> (see <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0199604#pone.0199604.g004" target="_blank">Fig 4</a>). Sloping lines represent linear regression models.</p
The experience of wanting to move in response to music is commonly known as feeling the groove. A... more The experience of wanting to move in response to music is commonly known as feeling the groove. According to the psychological model of musical groove by Senn et al. (2019), the causes for the urge to move are linked to the properties of the music itself, to the personal background of the listener, to the listening situation, and to feedback loops between body movement and cognition. The model formulates eight hypotheses stating that the music affects a listener’s urge to move mediated through a variety of cognitive processes. This study develops a method based on Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) to empirically test the model hypotheses. It evaluates five model hypotheses using data from an online listening experiment with 135 participants and 16 stylistically diverse musical stimuli (n=2160 observations). The SEM model had a good fit with the data (CFI=.958, RMSEA=.051) and explained a large proportion of the variance in the latent urge to move variable (R2=.737). Results show t...
Supplemental material, 839172_Supplementary_Materials for Taste and familiarity affect the experi... more Supplemental material, 839172_Supplementary_Materials for Taste and familiarity affect the experience of groove in popular music by Olivier Senn, Toni Amadeus Bechtold, Florian Hoesl and Lorenz Kilchenmann in Musicae Scientiae
Stimuli and datasets for the study "A Stimuli Set of Forty Popular Music Drum Patterns with ... more Stimuli and datasets for the study "A Stimuli Set of Forty Popular Music Drum Patterns with Perceived Complexity Estimates"
Music criticism has a long tradition as a leading agent in the classical music discourse. However... more Music criticism has a long tradition as a leading agent in the classical music discourse. However, some people question its function in the contemporary music market. We explored the topicality of classical music critique by asking: Who reads professional reviews today? And what do readers expect from review? Through an online survey (English/German), we profiled the listening habits of classical music listeners (N ¼ 1200) and their engagement with professional reviews. Our participants were more actively engaged with music, but contrary to the 'highbrow' stereotype, not more highly musically trained than the general population. They consumed music and opinion sources in a variety of ways. Approximately two-thirds (n ¼ 741) of the participants had recently engaged with professional reviews, which were perceived as the most useful form of opinion, followed by short written commentaries and, lastly, ratings. A multiple logistic regression model suggested that the typical consu...
Patterned microtiming deviations from metronomic regularity are ubiquitous in the performance of ... more Patterned microtiming deviations from metronomic regularity are ubiquitous in the performance of metered music. The relevance of microtiming to the perception of music has been studied since the 1980s. Most recently, microtiming has been investigated as a cause of groove (i.e., the pleasant urge to move in response to music). The study of microtiming relies on the availability of microtiming data. This report presents three large corpora of onset timings derived from drum kit performances in popular Anglo-American popular music styles. These data are made freely available (CC 4.0 license) to provide a resource for use by analysts and experimenters alike. They offer a common point of reference for future studies into the temporal facets of music performance. The datasets adhere to FAIR principles; they thus facilitate replication of analyses and experimental stimuli.
rom a bird’s-eye perspective, the two decades between 1960 and 1980 would seem to have been a tim... more rom a bird’s-eye perspective, the two decades between 1960 and 1980 would seem to have been a time of new departures for jazz in Europe: a time of experimentation, societal rebellion, and musical and stylistic emancipation; a time when connecting across international boundaries became the norm, when self-organising institutions emerged, and when jazz became an established factor in the canon of cultural and educational policy. These processes ran in parallel (or at least seemed to) in different European countries. The project ‘Growing up: The emancipation of jazz in Switzerland from 1965 to 1980’ funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation at the Bern University of the Arts (HKB) demonstrates how this development can also be observed in a country such as Switzerland that has been situated somewhat on the periphery of jazz history. Swiss jazz musicians (most of them men, only occasionally women) had integrated the post-War developments of US jazz in their own music in the 1950s a...
Music often triggers a pleasurable urge in listeners to move their bodies in response to the rhyt... more Music often triggers a pleasurable urge in listeners to move their bodies in response to the rhythm. In music psychology, this experience is commonly referred to as groove. This study presents the Experience of Groove Questionnaire, a newly developed self-report questionnaire that enables respondents to subjectively assess how strongly they feel an urge to move and pleasure while listening to music. The development of the questionnaire was carried out in several stages: candidate questionnaire items were generated on the basis of the groove literature, and their suitability was judged by fifteen groove and rhythm research experts. Two listening experiments were carried out in order to reduce the number of items, to validate the instrument, and to estimate its reliability. The final questionnaire consists of two scales with three items each that reliably measure respondents’ urge to move (Cronbach’s α = .92) and their experience of pleasure (α = .97) while listening to music. The two...
This study develops three composite psychometric scales for the use in listening experiments acro... more This study develops three composite psychometric scales for the use in listening experiments across music psychology. The new scales measure the following three psychological constructs: (1) Inner representation of temporal regularity: This scale allows listeners to assess to what extent they experience a subjective feeling of temporal regularity and predictability while listening to music. The scale consists of four items, and it measures the underlying construct with good reliability (Cronbach's α = .88). (2) Time-related interest: This scale measures how much listeners feel that the rhythm of the music captures their attention. The scale consists of three items and shows good reliability (α = .85). (3) Energetic arousal: This scale measures how much the listeners feel energized while they are listening to music. The scale uses four items and has excellent reliability (α = .95). The development of the scales was motivated by the psychological model of musical groove in which the three underlying psychological constructs play an important role; the new scales serve to test the model hypotheses. The three scales can also be administered separately and might prove to be useful in research contexts within music psychology that investigate subjective experiences of temporal regularity, interest, or energetic arousal in music listeners.
The study by Lee & Zaryab (this issue) investigated whether listening to high-groove music affect... more The study by Lee & Zaryab (this issue) investigated whether listening to high-groove music affects how heterosexual observers rate the attractiveness of people from the opposite sex. They found a very small positive effect of high-groove music on the male observers, but no effect on females. In my commentary, I argue for a more conservative interpretation of the results than the one offered by the authors.
When speaking about music, the term groove can refer to objective qualities, such as specific rhy... more When speaking about music, the term groove can refer to objective qualities, such as specific rhythmical patterns in certain genres, or to subjective experiences, such as the pleasurable urge to move to the music. The mere juxtaposition of objective musical causes and subjective psychological effects may, however, be too simplistic to fully capture the complex and multifaceted groove phenomenon. One way to broaden the perspective of groove research is to analyze how people use the term groove in everyday language. We therefore employed a text-mining approach with theme searches and sentiment analyses of 970,220 comments on 155 music videos on YouTube. The corresponding songs were previously rated on groove, operationalized as pleasurable urge to move (Senn et al., 2021, Musicae Scientiae, 25). Results show that groove terms were more likely to be used in comments on songs that received higher groove ratings, indicating that the use of groove in everyday language and experiencing an ...
This study presents a method to estimate the complexity of popular music drum patterns based on a... more This study presents a method to estimate the complexity of popular music drum patterns based on a core idea from predictive coding. Specifically, it postulates that the complexity of a drum pattern depends on the quantity of surprisal it causes in the listener. Surprisal, according to predictive coding theory, is a numerical measure that takes large values when the perceiver’s inner model of the surrounding world fails to predict the actual stream of sensory data (i.e. when the perception surprises the perceiver), and low values if model predictions and sensory data agree. The proposed new method first approximates a listener’s inner model of a popular music drum pattern (using ideas on inculturation and a Bayesian learning process). It then quantifies the listener’s surprisal evaluating the discrepancies between the predictions of the inner model and the actual drum pattern. It finally estimates drum pattern complexity from surprisal. The method was optimised and tested using a set...
This study presents an audio stimuli set of forty drum patterns from Western popular music togeth... more This study presents an audio stimuli set of forty drum patterns from Western popular music together with empirical data on the stimuli’s perceived complexity. The audio stimuli are meticulous reconstructions of drum patterns found in commercial recordings; they are based on careful transcriptions (carried out by professional musicians), drum stroke loudness information and exact onset timing measurements. Data on perceived stimulus complexity was collected in a listening experiment using a pairwise comparison design with 220 participants (4400 trials); and complexity measures were calculated using the Bradley-Terry probability model. The drum pattern stimuli and their perceptual complexity estimates can be used for listening experiments in which stimulus complexity is a relevant independent variable; and they allow to assess measures and models of drum pattern complexity.
<p>Mean <i>Groove</i> ratings of all 248 stimuli as a function of <i>Reco... more <p>Mean <i>Groove</i> ratings of all 248 stimuli as a function of <i>Recording Year</i>. Number keys are given in <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0199604#pone.0199604.t003" target="_blank">Table 3</a>.</p
<p>Groove ratings as a function of <i>Syncopation</i> (A), <i>Event Densi... more <p>Groove ratings as a function of <i>Syncopation</i> (A), <i>Event Density</i> (B), <i>Style Bias</i> and <i>Familiarity</i> (C): Small dots denote single observations, large symbols denote the mean <i>Groove</i> ratings of the 248 stimuli. The symbol shapes, colours, and sizes represent the <i>Pattern Category</i> (see <a href="http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0199604#pone.0199604.g004" target="_blank">Fig 4</a>). Sloping lines represent linear regression models.</p
The experience of wanting to move in response to music is commonly known as feeling the groove. A... more The experience of wanting to move in response to music is commonly known as feeling the groove. According to the psychological model of musical groove by Senn et al. (2019), the causes for the urge to move are linked to the properties of the music itself, to the personal background of the listener, to the listening situation, and to feedback loops between body movement and cognition. The model formulates eight hypotheses stating that the music affects a listener’s urge to move mediated through a variety of cognitive processes. This study develops a method based on Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) to empirically test the model hypotheses. It evaluates five model hypotheses using data from an online listening experiment with 135 participants and 16 stylistically diverse musical stimuli (n=2160 observations). The SEM model had a good fit with the data (CFI=.958, RMSEA=.051) and explained a large proportion of the variance in the latent urge to move variable (R2=.737). Results show t...
Supplemental material, 839172_Supplementary_Materials for Taste and familiarity affect the experi... more Supplemental material, 839172_Supplementary_Materials for Taste and familiarity affect the experience of groove in popular music by Olivier Senn, Toni Amadeus Bechtold, Florian Hoesl and Lorenz Kilchenmann in Musicae Scientiae
Stimuli and datasets for the study "A Stimuli Set of Forty Popular Music Drum Patterns with ... more Stimuli and datasets for the study "A Stimuli Set of Forty Popular Music Drum Patterns with Perceived Complexity Estimates"
Music criticism has a long tradition as a leading agent in the classical music discourse. However... more Music criticism has a long tradition as a leading agent in the classical music discourse. However, some people question its function in the contemporary music market. We explored the topicality of classical music critique by asking: Who reads professional reviews today? And what do readers expect from review? Through an online survey (English/German), we profiled the listening habits of classical music listeners (N ¼ 1200) and their engagement with professional reviews. Our participants were more actively engaged with music, but contrary to the 'highbrow' stereotype, not more highly musically trained than the general population. They consumed music and opinion sources in a variety of ways. Approximately two-thirds (n ¼ 741) of the participants had recently engaged with professional reviews, which were perceived as the most useful form of opinion, followed by short written commentaries and, lastly, ratings. A multiple logistic regression model suggested that the typical consu...
Patterned microtiming deviations from metronomic regularity are ubiquitous in the performance of ... more Patterned microtiming deviations from metronomic regularity are ubiquitous in the performance of metered music. The relevance of microtiming to the perception of music has been studied since the 1980s. Most recently, microtiming has been investigated as a cause of groove (i.e., the pleasant urge to move in response to music). The study of microtiming relies on the availability of microtiming data. This report presents three large corpora of onset timings derived from drum kit performances in popular Anglo-American popular music styles. These data are made freely available (CC 4.0 license) to provide a resource for use by analysts and experimenters alike. They offer a common point of reference for future studies into the temporal facets of music performance. The datasets adhere to FAIR principles; they thus facilitate replication of analyses and experimental stimuli.
rom a bird’s-eye perspective, the two decades between 1960 and 1980 would seem to have been a tim... more rom a bird’s-eye perspective, the two decades between 1960 and 1980 would seem to have been a time of new departures for jazz in Europe: a time of experimentation, societal rebellion, and musical and stylistic emancipation; a time when connecting across international boundaries became the norm, when self-organising institutions emerged, and when jazz became an established factor in the canon of cultural and educational policy. These processes ran in parallel (or at least seemed to) in different European countries. The project ‘Growing up: The emancipation of jazz in Switzerland from 1965 to 1980’ funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation at the Bern University of the Arts (HKB) demonstrates how this development can also be observed in a country such as Switzerland that has been situated somewhat on the periphery of jazz history. Swiss jazz musicians (most of them men, only occasionally women) had integrated the post-War developments of US jazz in their own music in the 1950s a...
Music often triggers a pleasurable urge in listeners to move their bodies in response to the rhyt... more Music often triggers a pleasurable urge in listeners to move their bodies in response to the rhythm. In music psychology, this experience is commonly referred to as groove. This study presents the Experience of Groove Questionnaire, a newly developed self-report questionnaire that enables respondents to subjectively assess how strongly they feel an urge to move and pleasure while listening to music. The development of the questionnaire was carried out in several stages: candidate questionnaire items were generated on the basis of the groove literature, and their suitability was judged by fifteen groove and rhythm research experts. Two listening experiments were carried out in order to reduce the number of items, to validate the instrument, and to estimate its reliability. The final questionnaire consists of two scales with three items each that reliably measure respondents’ urge to move (Cronbach’s α = .92) and their experience of pleasure (α = .97) while listening to music. The two...
Uploads
Papers by Olivier Senn