Groove, Expressive Performance, and Musical Hedonia: Distinct Contributions on Pleasure and Movement Motivation

Music engages perceptual, motor, and emotional systems through the interplay of rhythmic structure, groove, and expressive performance. The present study examined how groove level (low vs. high) and performance style (mechanical vs. expressive) influence listeners’ pleasure and desire to move, and how these effects are modulated by musical hedonia, i.e., the individual's sensitivity to music reward. Seventy-two adult participants (N = 72) without formal musical training listened to 60 short piano excerpts spanning multiple genres, each presented in both mechanical (MIDI-generated) and expressive (performed by a professionally trained musician) versions. After each excerpt, participants rated their pleasure, desire to move, perceived rhythmic complexity, and familiarity. At the end of the session, they completed the extended Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire (eBMRQ), which measures musical hedonia. The results revealed a dissociation between affective and motor responses. Expressive performances elicited higher pleasure ratings, consistent with prior work showing that microtiming, articulation, and dynamic shaping enhance emotional communication. In contrast, the urge to move was driven primarily by groove level and beat clarity, as high-groove excerpts elicited the strongest desire to move. Mechanical versions, however, despite being rated as less pleasurable, produced greater movement motivation than expressive ones, reflecting the role of temporal regularity in motor entrainment. High-groove excerpts also elicited higher pleasure overall, indicating that affective and motoric responses can arise from shared predictive and rhythmic mechanisms. Musical hedonia further modulated the responses. A significant hedonia × version interaction showed that high-hedonia listeners were especially responsive to expressive performances. They exhibit a much larger increase in pleasure from mechanical to expressive versions. In contrast, low-hedonia participants showed minimal differences between versions and displayed little variation across groove levels. This indicates a generally reduced sensitivity to both affective nuance and rhythmic engagement. Overall, these findings demonstrate that musical pleasure and the desire to move rely on related but partially distinct processes within the musical reward system that interact. By jointly considering groove, expressiveness, and musical hedonia, the study provides a more integrated account of how specific musical features recruit emotional and motor mechanisms, influencing both pleasure and the desire to move.