Musical groove: body-movement, pleasure and embodied cognition - Maria Witek (University of Birmingham)

What is it about rhythm in music that makes people want to move? And why does moving to the beat feel so good? In this talk, I will review a selection of my research studies focusing on musical groove – defined in psychology as the pleasurable desire to move to a musical beat. Using online surveys, motion-capture and fMRI, I show how the rhythmic structure of syncopation affects pleasure and movement in an inverted U-shaped way, suggesting there’s a balance between complexity and predictability in groove. I finish with some reflections based on a cognitive-philosophical analysis of groove, casting syncopation as a route to physically enacting the beat, by using our bodies to fill in ‘gaps’ in the rhythmic surface. Groove thus becomes a palpable example of the embodied mind where boundaries between music, body and mind become blurred.

Biography

Maria A. G. Witek is Associate Professor at the Department of Music, University of Birmingham, UK. Before taking on this post, she worked at the Center for Music in the Brain, Aarhus University and the Royal Academy of Music, Denmark, where she remains an affiliated researcher. She holds a DPhil in Music from the University of Oxford, an MA in Music Psychology from the University of Sheffield and a BA in Musicology from the University of Oslo. Her research addresses the psychology, cognitive neuroscience and cognitive philosophy of musical rhythm, body-movement and affect, using methods such as brain imaging, motion-capture, physiological recording, participatory research methods, and phenomenological and music analysis. She is currently PI on the AHRC funded project ‘Embodied Timing and Disability in DJ Practice’ and co-I on the ‘Augmented Reality Music Ensemble’ project, funded by the EPSRC . She is also the meetings chair of RPPW – the Rhythm Perception and Production Workshop.