Musical Groove as Stabilization of Coordinated Movement: A Dynamical and Embodied Approach to Musical Rhythm

Research has shown that the bodily experience of a pleasurable urge to move to music, called groove, is the strongest for rhythms with an intermediate level of syncopation. Current theories explain groove in terms of predictive processes in the brain, as an active inference that resolves prediction errors caused by syncopation. Here, I present an alternative explanation of groove from a new dynamical and embodied approach to music perception and action. The new theory, called embodied dynamics of music, describes musical rhythm as a dynamic pattern of coordinated movement distributed in the brain and the body and governed by the principles and constraints of coordination dynamics. Specifically, beat-based rhythm is described as a coordinative structure in which beat-carrying oscillatory movements provide anchor points for coordinating discrete movements corresponding to individual rhythmic events. In this view, syncopation is a potentially destabilizing force in the coordinative structure, and groove is an active engagement that stabilizes the coordinative structure by reinforcing beat-carrying oscillation with body movement. I support this theory with an analysis of coordination dynamics and a minimal dynamical model of groove which stabilizes syncopated coordination with a metronome by amplifying its self-sustained oscillation.