Abstract
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.
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Acknowledgements
Center for Music in the Brain is funded by the Danish National Research Foundation (DNRF117). IK is funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research—Technology and Production Sciences. Financial support to TP was in part provided by the Zukunftskonzept at TU Dresden funded by the Exzellenzinitiative of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. MLK is supported by the ERC Consolidator Grant: CAREGIVING (n. 615539). We thank Kristian Nymoen and Birgitta Burger for help with the analysis.
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Witek, M.A.G., Popescu, T., Clarke, E.F. et al. Syncopation affects free body-movement in musical groove. Exp Brain Res 235, 995–1005 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-016-4855-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-016-4855-6