Experience of Groove Questionnaire: Instrument Development and Initial Validation

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 urge to move and pleasure while listening to music. The development of the questionnaire was carried out in several stages: candidate questionnaire items were generated on the basis of the groove literature, and their suitability was judged by fifteen groove and rhythm research experts. Two listening experiments were carried out in order to reduce the number of items, to validate the instrument, and to estimate its reliability. The final questionnaire consists of two scales with three items each that reliably measure respondents’ urge to move (Cronbach’s α = .92) and their experience of pleasure (α = .97) while listening to music. The two scales are highly correlated (r = .80), which indicates a strong association between motor and emotional responses to music. The scales of the Experience of Groove Questionnaire can independently be applied in groove research and in a variety of other research contexts in which listeners’ subjective experience of music-induced movement and enjoyment need to be addressed: for example the study of the interaction between music and motivation in sports and research on therapeutic applications of music in people with neurological movement disorders.