Scientists Figured Out Why Some Music Makes Us Want to Dance
Certain songs inspire us to bob our heads along or break out into dance and now we know why
Hiya!
As I type these words, I’m listening to a song called Sensitive by Jean Du Voyage. It’s the first track on my writing playlist, and I continually find myself nodding along to it as I write, entirely unintentionally. There’s just something about the song that makes me want to bop to the beat.
Scientists call this reaction to music the “groove experience,” and it has ancient roots. You’ve no doubt experienced this situation many times yourself. So, you might be as excited as I was to learn that scientists can finally explain why certain songs urge us to dance.
A Bit of History
Before we get to the research, let’s discuss a bit of ancient history. Considering our primate cousins are prone to drumming, it’s highly probable our Hominin ancestors were drumming in some form. Researchers have also found that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens living around a million years ago had the required anatomy to “sing.”
That said, it’s just about as impossible to know whether they sang as when and how they made drums. Because here’s the thing: prehistoric hominins may have sung, and they may have drummed, but doing either to a rhythm is a whole new evolutionary step.
Whenever we discovered rhythm, clapping our hands together may well have been our first instrument. This was likely followed by using natural materials — like banging two sticks together — to create instruments, but those would have decomposed long ago.
The earliest instruments discovered so far are flutes made of ivory and bone from tens of thousands of years ago. The oldest known instrument made by Homo sapiens was found in southwest Germany. It’s a flute made of vulture and swan wing bones dating to at least 30,000 years ago.
But, scientists found an even older flute, one between 50,000 and 60,000-year-old that is credited to the Neanderthals since it was found near a Neanderthal firepit. So it might be possible that music is something we shared with our Human cousins — it’s even possible the Neanderthals introduced our Homo sapien ancestors to music.
Anyway, the point is that our connection to music is ancient and deeply ingrained in us. This helps explain why music affects us strongly, but it doesn’t explain why only certain songs or melodies inspire the urge to dance.
Syncopation
The groove experience is the impulse we feel to bop to the beat of certain songs, but it doesn’t occur with just any or all music, and scientists wanted to understand why. The logical place to start is by taking a closer look at syncopation, which is basically how predictable a rhythm is.
I found a resource by Ben Dunnett, the founder of Music Theory Academy, that does a great job explaining and demonstrating the various degrees of syncopation. I recommend checking it out if you want an audio example. In it, Dunnett says:
The time signature of a piece of music gives an indication of a regular pattern of strong and weak beats. A syncopated rhythm goes against this pattern by putting the accent on weak beats.
In other words, syncopations are rhythmic patterns where the beats fall on unexpected places (or off-beat) to an underlying repetitive beat. The more syncopation a song has, the less predictable it is.
The Study
Cognitive neuroscientist Benjamin Morillon and his team from Aix-Marseille University in France think they’ve figured out the properties of a song or melody that trigger our desire to nod along. They published their study on March 4, 2024, in the journal Science Advances.
Morillon and his colleagues conducted research involving 66 participants (77 percent were female) between 19 and 71 years old to explore the connection between syncopation and the groove experience.
Method #1
In one experiment, Morillon and his team played 12 different melodies. All the examples had an underlying beat of two hertz (about two beats per second), but the overlying rhythmic melody included three ascending degrees of syncopation — low syncopation, followed by medium, then high. Remember, the higher the degree of syncopation, the more unpredictable the rhythm is.
Between tracks, the participants rated how strong their urge to dance was when listening.
Considering everything in Life and Nature is on a spectrum, and that balance seems to be the key, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the participants had the strongest desire to dance while listening to tracks with a medium degree of syncopation. Meanwhile, neither melodies with high or low syncopation degrees seemed to inspire the urge.
Method #2
The researchers also asked the participants to tap their fingers to the beat of imagined dance steps and found they did so almost exclusively to the underlying 2 Hz beat, not the overlying rhythm, suggesting the groove experience may be all about identifying the underlying pulse of a song.
Method #2
While the results from the questionnaires and participants tapping fingers their fingers to music are intriguing, Morillon and his team wanted to know what’s going on in the participants’ brains when the groove experience comes out to play.
So, to better understand how the brain creates dancing-type movements in response to a melody, the scientists used magnetoencephalography (MEG) to measure the brain activity of 29 people as they listened to music.
The results showed that our auditory cortex (which processes sound) tends to follow the overlying melody’s rhythm. But our dorsal auditory pathway (which connects our auditory cortex with the brain regions responsible for movement) appears to be where the overlying rhythm matches the underlying beat.
The researchers hypothesize that our impulse to dance originates from this pathway and is then sent to the motor areas as a movement impulse.
Method #3
Morillon and his team also developed a mathematical model showing their conclusions using a quadratic relationship.
When graphed, the result is an inverted U-curve with the highest points at the medium level of syncopation. This means a nice balance of syncopation over a steady beat is our happy place.
Putting it Together
When looking at the results from their research, Morillon and his colleagues rationalize that our brain is trying to predict upcoming beats within a melody, and the result is a desire to dance.
Constantina Theofanopoulou, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University and director of the Neurobiology of Social Communication Lab who was not involved in the study, explains:
“For a long time, music and dance have been studied separately [in the brain]. This study takes a step towards bridging the gap between the two.”
So far, most research focuses on the brain’s motor production related to dancing or the auditory perception of music — but rarely, if ever, do scientists look at both.
In the Future
Morillon is naturally excited by their findings, both in discovering the ideal syncopation degree to spur our desire to dance along to a tune and identifying the brain regions likely responsible.
However, one of his primary motivations in this direction of study isn’t melody or even syncopation — but time. More specifically, he wants to understand how we make sense of time and how our motor systems help us identify temporal patterns to predict the future better. Morillon explains:
“What I find fascinating is our lack of a dedicated sense of time. We have specialized systems for processing sound and light, but time perception remains elusive.”
I’m super fascinated by that point, and yet, it seems we’ll have to wait to learn more.
Perspective Shift
Researchers seem to have overlooked one aspect of the groove experience: how good it feels. I know that’s kind of a given, but if the scientists are correct and the groove experience is about predicting the future, does that mean it somehow relates to our survival skills? Or maybe we enjoy the groove experience with moderate levels of syncopation because it allows us to be correct, and being right feels good.
Too much syncopation is too unpredictable, while too little is boring, but the sweet groove experience mid-point allows us to predict future melodies accurately, and the result is bursting into dance.
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I’ll be dancing a lot this week, and now I’ll do so more mindfully. Thanks