Musical Groove Is Correlated with Properties of the Audio Signal as Revealed by Computational Modelling, Depending on Musical Style

With groove we mean the subjective experience of wanting to move rhythmically when listening to music. Previous research has indicated that physical properties of the sound signal contribute to groove as opposed to mere association due to previous exposure, for example. Here, a number of quantitative descriptors of rhythmic and temporal properties were derived from the audio signal by means of computational modeling methods. The music examples were 100 samples from 5 distinct music styles, which were all unfamiliar to the listeners. Listeners’ ratings of groove were correlated with aspects of rhythmic patterning for Greek, Indian, Samba, and West African music. Microtiming was positively correlated with groove for Samba and negatively correlated with groove for Greek, but had very small unique contributions in addition to the rhythmical properties. For Jazz, none of the measured properties had any significant contributions to groove ratings.