Integrating methods from experimental social psychology and music perception, we tested the hypothesis that when listeners personally like a musician, they will be more inclined to experience his or her music as both provoking movement and as subjectively pleasurable, the two core features of perceived groove. In Experiment 1, participants were exposed to a set of moderately-syncopated, high-groove drum-breaks which they were led to believe were either produced by a relatively likable or unlikable musician. In line with predictions, participants led to find the musician more versus less likable rated the same drum-breaks as more evocative of both the urge to move and of feelings of pleasure. When participants in a follow-up study (Experiment 2) were administered the exact same manipulation of likability, but exposed to highly-syncopated, low-groove drum-breaks, these effects were eradicated, suggesting that the results of Experiment 1 were not merely due to demand characteristics or response biases. Together, these findings support the notion that listeners are more responsive to “participating in the music” when they are relatively motivated to affiliate with the musician(s). Methodological limitations and directions for future research on the social psychological underpinnings of groove are discussed.

Speech and song have frequently been treated as contrasting categories. We here observe a variety of collective activities in which multiple participants utter the same thing at the same time, a behavior we call joint speech. This simple empirical definition serves to single out practices of ritual, protest, and the enactment of identity that span the range from speech to song and allows consideration of the manner in which such activities serve to ground collectives. We consider how the musical elements in joint speech such as rhythm, melody, and instrumentation are related to the context of occurrence and the purposes of the participants. While music and language have been greatly altered by developments in media technologies—from writing to recordings—joint speech has been, and continues to be, an integral part of practices, both formal and informal, from which communities derive their identity. The absence of joint speech from the scientific treatment of language has made language appear as an abstract intellectual and highly individualized activity. Joint speech may act as a corrective to draw our attention back to the voice in context, and the manner in which collective identities are enacted.

Music expertise has been shown to enhance emotion recognition from speech prosody. Yet, it is currently unclear whether music training enhances the recognition of emotions through other communicative modalities such as vision and whether it enhances the feeling of such emotions. Musicians and nonmusicians were presented with visual, auditory, and audiovisual clips consisting of the biological motion and speech prosody of two agents interacting. Participants judged as quickly as possible whether the expressed emotion was happiness or anger, and subsequently indicated whether they also felt the emotion they had perceived. Measures of accuracy and reaction time were collected from the emotion recognition judgements, while yes/no responses were collected as indication of felt emotions. Musicians were more accurate than nonmusicians at recognizing emotion in the auditory-only condition, but not in the visual-only or audiovisual conditions. Although music training enhanced recognition of emotion through sound, it did not affect the felt emotion. These findings indicate that emotional processing in music and language may use overlapping but also divergent resources, or that some aspects of emotional processing are less responsive to music training than others. Hence music training may be an effective rehabilitative device for interpreting others’ emotion through speech.

In charting the “territory between speech and song,” Cummins (2020) identifies various forms of vocal behavior involving “multiple people uttering the same thing at the same time”—what the author calls “joint speech.” I interrogate this conceptual framework in light of specific examples both musical and linguistic, which suggest a usefully expanded category: “collaborative vocality.” At the same time, I also propose a distinctly musical account of joint speech that ultimately affirms the conventional separation between music and language. Central to this account is an analysis of the unique character of singing and an insistence on the centrality of pleasure in musical experience.

In his article “The Territory Between Speech and Song: A Joint Speech Perspective,” Cummins (2020) argues that research has failed to adequately recognize an important category of vocal activity that falls outside of the domains of language and music, at least as they are typically defined. This category, referred to by Cummins as joint speech , spans a range of vocal activity so broad that it is not possible to define it using musical or phonetic terms. Instead, the feature that draws the varied examples together is vocal activity that is coordinated across participants and embedded in a physical and social context. In this invited commentary, I argue that although joint speech adds an important thread to the discourse on the relations between speech and song by putting an emphasis on the collective, it is ultimately related to a wider class of joint action phenomena found in the animal kingdom.

The pleasurable desire to move to a beat is known as groove and is partly explained by rhythmic syncopation. While many contemporary groove-directed genres originated in the African diaspora, groove music psychology has almost exclusively studied European or North American listeners. While cross-cultural approaches can help us understand how different populations respond to music, comparing African and Western musical behaviors has historically tended to rely on stereotypes. Here we report on two studies in which sensorimotor and groove responses to syncopation were measured in university students and staff from Cape Coast, Ghana and Williamstown, MA, United States. In our experimental designs and interpretations, we show sensitivity towards the ethical implications of doing cross-cultural research in an African context. The Ghanaian group showed greater synchronization precision than Americans during monophonic syncopated patterns, but this was not reflected in synchronization accuracy. There was no significant group difference in the pleasurable desire to move. Our results have implications for how we understand the relationship between exposure and synchronization, and how we define syncopation in cultural and musical contexts. We hope our critical approach to cross-cultural comparison contributes to developing music psychology into a more inclusive and culturally grounded field.

Perceived valence, tension, and movement of harmonic musical intervals (from the unison to the octave presented in a low- and high-register) and standard noises (brown, pink, white, blue, purple) were assessed in two studies that differed in the crossmodal procedure by which tension and movement were rated: proprioceptive device or visual analog scale. Valence was evaluated in both studies with the visual analog scale. In a preliminary study, the proprioceptive device was calibrated with a psychophysical procedure. Roughness of the stimuli was included as covariate. Tension was perceived higher in dissonant intervals and in intervals presented in the high register. The higher the high-pitch energy content in the standard noise, the higher the perceived tension. The visual analog scale resulted in higher tension ratings than the proprioceptive device. Perception of movement was higher in dissonant intervals, in intervals in the high register, and in standard noises than in musical intervals. High-pitch spectrum noises were associated with more sense of movement than low-pitch spectrum noises. Consonant intervals and low-register intervals were evaluated as more pleasant than dissonant and high-register intervals. High-pitch spectrum purple and blue noises were evaluated as more unpleasant than low-pitch spectrum noises.