Musical groove listening does not enhance primary motor cortex activation

Abstract Groove is the pleasurable urge to move to the beat of music, a universally experienced human phenomenon. Because listeners are often inspired to move to music with groove, we asked whether high-groove music would promote greater motor system activity than low-groove music, noise, or silence, as shown by shorter latency and/or greater amplitude of the lateralized readiness potential (LRP), an event-related potential measure of neural response preparation and execution in the primary motor cortex. In Experiment 1, 21 participants were presented with one of two symbols (@ and #) on a computer monitor and pressed a button with their left or right hand, depending on which symbol was presented, while listening to high-groove music, low-groove music, noise, or silence. Throughout the duration of the experiment, electroencephalography was recorded at the scalp and we calculated stimulus-locked and response-locked activity by averaging across correctly responded, non-artifact trials. In Experiment 2, 31 participants were tested with the same stimuli, procedure, and analysis, with the following exception: instead of responding to visual stimuli, participants pressed a button with their left or right hand, depending on whether they heard an occasional increase or decrease in intensity in the music or noise. None of the analyses in either experiment showed differences in LRP latency or amplitude between the high-groove or low-groove conditions. Several of the analyses yielded Bayes Factor values greater than 3 in favor of the null hypothesis. Thus, we found no evidence that high-groove music enhances activity in the primary motor cortex. Future studies should use other brain activity measurement and manipulation techniques to test the generality of our findings, including techniques that can separately measure different motor and auditory cortical areas.