Body maps of the sensation of musical groove

Abstract Rhythmic music often leads to an urge to move the body in time with the music. This urge to move can be a pleasurable experience. In psychology, we define the pleasurable wanting to move to music as groove. Here, we investigate where in the body these two groove components – movement and pleasure – are felt, and whether the embodied sensations depend on the musical genre. Using a body sensation map paradigm, we found that the funk genre, which elicited high levels of groove, increased sensations across the whole body, including in the head, shoulders, upper chest, abdomen, arms, hands, hips, legs and feet. Importantly, wanting to move and pleasure produced distinct body maps, with wanting to move associated with more sensation in the extremities, and pleasure more associated with feelings in the chest and abdomen. Exploratory analyses also found an inverted U-shaped relationship between wanting to move and pleasure ratings and the rhythmic complexity of the excerpts, as indexed by pulse entropy, and that medium pulse entropy produced sensations in the upper chest, shoulders, hips and ankles. The results are discussed in relation to theories of embodied predictive processing, highlighting the potential role of interoception in musical prediction and reward. Overall, our study shows clear patterns of embodied differentiation for different components and levels of groove.