Null effect of perceived drum pattern complexity on the experience of groove

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-U hypothesis). Studies that confirmed the inverted-U hypothesis usually based their measure of complexity on the rhythmic phenomenon of syncopation, where rhythms with more and/or stronger syncopation are considered to be more complex than less syncopated rhythms. However, syncopation is not the same as complexity and represents only one rhythmic device that makes music complex. This study attempts the verification of the inverted-U hypothesis independently from syncopation. It uses a new stimulus set of forty idiomatic popular music drum patterns whose perceptual complexity was measured experimentally in a previous study. The current study reports the results of a listening experiment with n = 179 participants, in which the inverted-U hypothesis was not confirmed. Complexity did not have any significant effect on listeners’ urge to move (p = 834). Results are discussed in the context of the psychological model of musical groove, which offers a nuance to this null result: simple drum patterns motivate listeners to dance because they convey metric clarity; complex patterns invite dancing because they are interesting. Yet, overall, the urge to move does not seem to depend on complexity, at least in the case of idiomatic drum patterns that are typically encountered in the Western popular music repertoire.