The perceived catchiness of music affects the experience of groove.

Catchiness and groove are common phenomena when listening to popular music. Catchiness may be a potential factor for experiencing groove but quantitative evidence for such a relationship is missing. To examine whether and how catchiness influences a key component of groove-the pleasurable urge to move to music (PLUMM)-we conducted a listening experiment with 450 participants and 240 short popular music clips of drum patterns, bass lines or keys/guitar parts. We found four main results: (1) catchiness as measured in a recognition task was only weakly associated with participants' perceived catchiness of music. We showed that perceived catchiness is multi-dimensional, subjective, and strongly associated with pleasure. (2) We found a sizeable positive relationship between PLUMM and perceived catchiness. (3) However, the relationship is complex, as further analysis showed that pleasure suppresses perceived catchiness' effect on the urge to move. (4) We compared common factors that promote perceived catchiness and PLUMM and found that listener-related variables contributed similarly, while the effects of musical content diverged. Overall, our data suggests music perceived as catchy is likely to foster groove experiences.

Articulation and Dynamics Influence the Perceptual Attack Time of Saxophone Sounds.

Perceptual attack time (PAT) is defined as the moment when the most salient rhythmical feature of a sound is perceived. This paper focuses on the PAT of saxophone sounds, investigating how the location of this point in time changes when a note is played with different characteristics. Nine saxophone sounds that differ in articulation and dynamics were examined. Ground truth for PAT was determined in a synchronization judgment experiment with 40 participants. Articulation (p < 0.001, η2 = 0.316), dynamics (p < 0.001, η2 = 0.098), and their interaction (p < 0.001, η2 = 0.094) affected the placement of the PAT. The onset rise time, which has been used as a predictor for PAT in earlier studies, was only weakly correlated with PAT (r = 0.143, p = 0.006).