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One of the most immediate and overt ways in which people respond to music is by moving their bodies to the beat. However, the extent to which the rhythmic complexity of groove—specifically its syncopation—contributes to how people spontaneously move to music is largely unexplored. Here, we measured free movements in hand and torso while participants listened to drum-breaks with various degrees of syncopation. We found that drum-breaks with medium degrees of syncopation were associated with the same amount of acceleration and synchronisation as low degrees of syncopation. Participants who enjoyed dancing made more complex movements than those who did not enjoy dancing. While for all participants hand movements accelerated more and were more complex, torso movements were more synchronised to the beat. Overall, movements were mostly synchronised to the main beat and half-beat level, depending on the body-part. We demonstrate that while people do not move or synchronise much to rhythms with high syncopation when dancing spontaneously to music, the relationship between rhythmic complexity and synchronisation is less linear than in simple finger-tapping studies.

The Pleasurable desire to Move to A beat is known as groove and is partly explained by rhythmic syncopation. While many contemporary groovedirected genres originated in the African diaspora, groove music psychology has almost exclusively studied European or North American listeners. While crosscultural approaches can help us understand how different populations respond to music, comparing African and Western musical behaviors has historically tended to rely on stereotypes. Here we report on two studies in which sensorimotor and groove responses to syncopation were measured in university students and staff from Cape Coast, Ghana and Williamstown, MA, United States. In our experimental designs and interpretations, we show sensitivity towards the ethical implications of doing cross-cultural research in an African context. The Ghanaian group showed greater synchronization precision than Americans during monophonic syncopated patterns, but this was not reflected in synchronization accuracy. There was no significant group difference in the pleasurable desire to move. Our results have implications for how we understand the relationship between exposure and synchronization, and how we define syncopation in cultural and musical contexts. We hope our critical approach to cross-cultural comparison contributes to developing music psychology into a more inclusive and culturally grounded field.

Recent studies suggest that rhythmic syncopation is a relevant predictor for groove. In order to validate these claims, a reliable measure of rhythmic syncopation is required. This article investigates whether a particular notation-based model for estimating syncopation in Western popular music drum patterns adequately predicts perceived syncopation. A listening experiment was carried out with 25 professional musicians. Six popular music drum patterns were presented to the participants in all 15 pairwise combinations, and the participants chose the pattern from each pair that was more syncopated (win), compared to the other pattern (lose). Perceived syncopation was defined as the proportion of wins for each stimulus. The experiment showed that the model works well in general, but that it overemphasises the weight of syncopes on weak metric positions. This exaggerates the syncopation value of one particular drum pattern and generally leads to inflated syncopation values in the upper syncopation range. In consequence, the fit between the model and perceived syncopation was poor, even when flexible logarithmic functions ( χ 4 2 = 26.980 , p < .001) or exponential approach functions ( χ 4 2 = 28.344 , p < .001) were used to link the model predictions to perceived syncopation. The model was revised and a numeric optimisation process was carried out to improve its fit. The revised model produces syncopation estimates that have a linear relationship with the perceived syncopation measures and a good fit with the data ( χ 3 2 = 2.537 , p = .469). However, this revised model is based on only six drum patterns that cover a very limited range of rhythmic phenomena. In order to create a general model of syncopation in popular music drum patterns, further modelling work is necessary that involves a larger number and a wider variety of patterns.

Integrating Methods From Experimental social psychology and music perception, we tested the hypothesis that when listeners personally like a musician, they will be more inclined to experience his or her music as both provoking movement and as subjectively pleasurable, the two core features of perceived groove. In Experiment 1, participants were exposed to a set of moderately-syncopated, high-groove drum-breaks which they were led to believe were either produced by a relatively likable or unlikable musician. In line with predictions, participants led to find the musician more versus less likable rated the same drum-breaks as more evocative of both the urge to move and of feelings of pleasure. When participants in a follow-up study (Experiment 2) were administered the exact same manipulation of likability, but exposed to highlysyncopated, low-groove drum-breaks, these effects were eradicated, suggesting that the results of Experiment 1 were not merely due to demand characteristics or response biases. Together, these findings support the notion that listeners are more responsive to “participating in the music” when they are relatively motivated to affiliate with the musician(s). Methodological limitations and directions for future research on the social psychological underpinnings of groove are discussed.

Previous work on sensorimotor synchronization has investigated the dynamics of finger tapping and how individual movement trajectories contribute to timing accuracy via asymmetry in movement velocities. The present study investigated sensorimotor synchronization (in-phase) and syncopation (anti-phase) to both an auditory metronome and a visual flashing light at multiple frequencies to understand how individual movement phases contribute to the variability of timekeeping and error correction in different sensory modalities and with different task constraints. Results demonstrate that the proportional time spent in both the upward phase of movement and the holding phase of movement (time spent on the surface of the table) remain relatively invariant across both stimulus modalities and across tapping styles (syncopation and synchronization), but changes with interval duration, increasing as interval duration increases. The time spent in the downward phase of movement did significantly differ across stimulus modality and tapping style, increasing during both visuomotor timing and syncopation, accompanied by a significant decrease in flexion velocity during syncopation. Extension velocity and flexion time were found to be the main contributors to differences between visual and auditory timing, while flexion velocity and flexion time were found to be the main contributors to differences between synchronization and syncopation. No correlations were found between asynchrony and the upward, downward, or holding phases of movement, suggesting the existence of multiple error correction strategies.

This study investigated cognitive and emotional effects of syncopation, a feature of musical rhythm that produces expectancy violations in the listener by emphasising weak temporal locations and de-emphasising strong locations in metric structure. Stimuli consisting of pairs of unsyncopated and syncopated musical phrases were rated by 35 musicians for perceived complexity, enjoyment, happiness, arousal, and tension. Overall, syncopated patterns were more enjoyed, and rated as happier, than unsyncopated patterns, while differences in perceived tension were unreliable. Complexity and arousal ratings were asymmetric by serial order, increasing when patterns moved from unsyncopated to syncopated, but not significantly changing when order was reversed. These results suggest that syncopation influences emotional valence (positively), and that while syncopated rhythms are objectively more complex than unsyncopated rhythms, this difference is more salient when complexity increases than when it decreases. It is proposed that composers and improvisers may exploit this asymmetry in perceived complexity by favoring formal structures that progress from rhythmically simple to complex, as can be observed in the initial sections of musical forms such as theme and variations.

In the article \"Emotion Painting: Lyric, affect, and musical relationships in a large lead-sheet corpus\", Sun and Cuthbert (2017) explored the correlations between affect-carrying lyrics and musical features such as beat strength, pitch height, consonance, and mode. Several musical features did indeed turn out to be highly correlated with the affect of the lyrics. However, correlations between other features, particularly mode-related musical features and lyric affect, were either insignificant or even contradicted previous research. In the current commentary, it is argued that the difference between the musical features that show significant correlations and those that do not is that the former have a local musical effect whereas the latter tend to affect the mood of a whole phrase or piece, and that the way Sun and Cuthbert estimate lyric affect for sentences or song may not be appropriate. Furthermore, a few remarks are made about the way Sun and Cuthbert treat multi-syllable words and about some basic assumptions concerning the relation between music and lyrics in a song. Nevertheless, the authors are praised for their innovative and interesting work, while several alternative and additional analyses (for example with scale-degree qualia and syncopations) are proposed.

I define a second-position syncopation as one involving a long note or accent on the second quarter of a half-note or quarter-note unit. I present a corpus analysis of second-position syncopation in 19th-century European and American vocal music. I argue that the analysis of syncopation requires consideration of other musical features besides note-onset patterns, including pitch contour, duration, and text-setting. The corpus analysis reveals that second-position syncopation was common in English, Scottish, Euro-American, and African-American vocal music, but rare in French, German, and Italian vocal music. This suggests that the prevalence of such syncopations in ragtime and later popular music was at least partly due to British influence.

Generated rhythms and the metric matrix can both be modelled by time-domain equivalents to projections of higher-dimensional lattices. Scott Joplin’s music is a case study for how these structures can illuminate both musical and philosophical aims. Musically, lattice projections show how Joplin creates a sense of multiple beat streams unfolding at once. Philosophically, these structures sonically reinforce a Du Boisian approach to understanding Joplin’s work.

In the article Second-Position Syncopation in European and American Vocal Music, David Temperley presents an empirical, socio-cultural survey of syncopation in 19th-century Western music. He espouses the following novel ideas about operational definitions of syncopation: 1) that syncopations on the second position of a duple hierarchy are musically, and culturally, distinct from fourth-position syncopations; 2) that more detailed operational definitions of syncopation, what Temperley calls \"acute\" syncopations, are needed to properly understand syncopation. Following up on Temperley's work, I apply his definitions of syncopation to a corpus of more recent Anglo-American popular music (Gauvin, Condit-Schultz, & Arthur 2017). I discuss how Temperley's definitions must be adapted and expanded to fit this different, more diverse, dataset, proposing several new syncopation definitions of my own. I also discuss some statistical assumptions that ought to be better addressed in future work, and speculate on how inconsistencies of music notation might hinder historical studies like Temperley's.