Investigating the effects of “feeling moved” and “groove” on standstill

<p>Music makes us move, even when we try to stand still. The standstill paradigm has been used in previous research to show that even when participants try to stand still, music makes us move more than silence and certain musical genres and features evoke more involuntary motion than others. We used a standstill championship with 157 participants to explore how involuntary motion is affected by groove-based music and its associated rhythmic structures, instrumentation, and emotionally moving music. We also examined the social experience by exploring whether achieving a shared goal of standing still to music would be associated with greater social connectedness. After correcting for multiple comparisons, we found an effect of instrumentation such that music evoked more involuntary motion than silence overall as well as in the mediolateral and vertical dimensions. Music excerpts also evoked more motion than drum recordings in the vertical dimension. Contrary to our hypotheses, there were no significant effects of groove or feeling moved on involuntary motion. Feelings of social connectedness were correlated with feelings of group success, but not actual quantity of motion. Together, these results contribute to research on the embodied nature of mu-sic cognition and suggest that music has complex effects on involuntary motion.</p>