Musical Emotions Predicted by Feelings of Entrainment

In our study, two groups of participants (n = 61 and n = 58) listened to nine pieces for solo violin and rated how they felt along an affect dimension and along the nine Geneva Emotional Music Scale dimensions. After each piece, they completed a 12-item questionnaire corresponding to subjective entrainment reports. A factorial analysis of this Musical Entrainment Questionnaire revealed a two-factor solution, with Visceral Entrainment (VE) corresponding to sensations of internal bodily entrainment and Motor Entrainment (ME) reflecting participants’ inclination to move to the beat. These findings represent, to the best of our knowledge, the first empirical evidence for the existence of two components underlying entrainment capable of predicting specific emotional responses to music. Indeed, although both factors predicted Affect, Joyful activation, Transcendence, Wonder, Power, and Tenderness dimensions, only VE predicted Nostalgia and Sadness. Moreover, Peacefulness was mostly predicted by ME, whereas Tension was mostly predicted by VE.