Toni Amadeus Bechtold

Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts | HSLU · Department of Music and Art Performance

Music psychology defines groove as humans’ pleasureable urge to move their body in synchrony with music. Past research has found that rhythmic syncopation, event density, beat salience, and rhythmic variability are positively associated with groove. This exploratory study investigates the groove effect of 248 reconstructed drum patterns from differ...

Perceptual attack time (PAT) is defined as the moment when the most salient rhythmical feature of a sound is perceived. This paper focuses on the PAT of saxophone sounds, investigating how the location of this point in time changes when a note is played with different characteristics. Nine saxophone sounds that differ in articulation and dynamics w...

Groove is a common experience in music listeners, often described as an enjoyable impulse to move in synchrony with the music. Research has suggested that the groove experience is influenced by listeners’ musical taste and their familiarity with a musical repertoire. This study reports the results from an online listening experiment in which 233 pa...

There is a broad consensus in groove research that the experience of groove, understood as a pleasurable urge to move in response to music, is to some extent related to the complexity of the rhythm. Specifically, music with medium rhythmic complexity has been found to motivate greater urge to move compared to low or high complexity music (inverted-...

The groove experience has been defined as a pleasant sense of wanting to move along with the music. Tempo, the pacing of musical events affects our perception of melody, rhythm, motion, and emotion and as such it is considered a fundamental musical dimension. This study investigates how varying the tempo of popular music drum & bass patterns influe...

This study investigates how polyphonic timbre, an important factor in music listening, influences the groove experience, one of the most important reactions to music. We selected six short popular music bass and drum patterns from the genres funk, pop, and rock and rendered them with three different genre-typical timbres (funk, pop, rock) each (18...

Catchiness and groove are common phenomena when listening to popular music. Catchiness may be a potential factor for experiencing groove but quantitative evidence for such a relationship is missing. To examine whether and how catchiness influences a key component of groove–the pleasurable urge to move to music (PLUMM)–we conducted a listening exper...

There is a broad consensus in groove research that the experience of groove, understood as a pleasurable urge to move in response to music, is related to the complexity of the rhythm. Specifically, music with medium rhythmic complexity has been found to motivate greater urge to move compared to low or high complexity music (inverted-U hypothesis)....

When speaking about music, the term groove can refer to objective qualities, such as rhythmic patterns, or to subjective experiences, such as the pleasurable urge to move to the music. However, the mere juxtaposition of objective musical causes and subjective psychological effects may be too simplistic to fully capture the multifaceted groove pheno...

A Driving Beat with a Captivating Melody on Top: The Relationship between Groove and Catchiness in Polyphonic Popular Music Keywords: Groove, Catchiness, Music Psychology, Rhythm, Expert interviews Background In western popular music, we often find compositions in which a salient melody or riff is put over a steady driving background. Such music...

This study presents an audio stimulus set of 40 drum patterns from Western popular music with empirical measurements of perceived complexity. The audio stimuli are meticulous reconstructions of drum patterns found in commercial recordings; they are based on careful transcriptions (carried out by professional musicians), drum stroke loudness informa...

This study develops three composite psychometric scales for the use in listening experiments across music psychology. The new scales measure the following three psychological constructs: (1) Inner representation of temporal regularity: This scale allows listeners to assess to what extent they experience a subjective feeling of temporal regularity a...

The Lucerne Groove Library (www.grooveresearch.ch) is a corpus of realistic sounding and ecologically valid stimuli created for the use in music psychological experiments. It currently consists of 250 short western popular music drum beat stimuli. In an ongoing project, we are extending this library to 447 bass und drum stimuli and focus on facilit...

Groove and catchiness are central properties of popular music that frequently appear together. Yet, a possible relationship has neither been postulated nor examined. In music psychology, groove is commonly understood as a pleasurable urge to move. Catchiness is often tied to the memorability of music, but it is less researched, and definitions are...

In music psychology, the experience of wanting to move in response to music is commonly known as feeling the groove. According to the psychological model of musical groove by Senn et al., the causes for the urge to move are linked to the properties of the music itself, to the personal background of the listener, to the listening situation, and to f...

When speaking about music, the term groove can refer to objective qualities, such as specific rhythmical patterns in certain genres, or to subjective experiences, such as the pleasurable urge to move to the music. The mere juxtaposition of objective musical causes and subjective psychological effects may, however, be too simplistic to fully capture...

This study presents an audio stimuli set of forty drum patterns from Western popular music together with empirical data on the stimuli’s perceived complexity. The audio stimuli are meticulous reconstructions of drum patterns found in commercial recordings; they are based on careful transcriptions (carried out by professional musicians), drum stroke...

The majority of music psychologists understands the groove experience as a pleasurable urge to move in response to music. Senn et al.’s (2019, 2022) psychological model of musical groove formulates hypotheses about the cognitive processes and other factors associated with the groove experience. Specifically, it hypothesises that listeners’ urge to...

The experience of wanting to move in response to music is commonly known as feeling the groove. According to the psychological model of musical groove by Senn et al. (2019), the causes for the urge to move are linked to the properties of the music itself, to the personal background of the listener, to the listening situation, and to feedback loops...

Patterned microtiming deviations from metronomic regularity are ubiquitous in the performance of metered music. The relevance of microtiming to the perception of music has been studied since the 1980s. Most recently, microtiming has been investigated as a cause of groove (i.e., the pleasant urge to move in response to music). The study of microtimi...

In recent empirical research, the experience of groove (i.e., the pleasant sense of wanting to move along with the music) has come into focus. By developing the new Experience of Groove Questionnaire (EGQ), Senn et al. (2020) have provided a standardized and validated research instrument for future studies, consisting of the two correlated factors...

MUSIC OFTEN TRIGGERS A PLEASURABLE URGE IN listeners to move their bodies in response to the rhythm. In music psychology, this experience is commonly referred to as groove. This study presents the Experience of Groove Questionnaire, a newly developed self-report questionnaire that enables respondents to subjectively assess how strongly they feel an...

List of drummers and tracks. (XLSX)

Background The field of groove studies has seen an increased interest in recent years, but the factors influencing groove are still largely unknown. In order to study the groove phenomenon empirically, the availability of ecologically valid and modifiable acoustic stimuli is of crucial importance. As of yet, no collection of audio or MIDI data has...