Music Cognition Matters - The pleasurable urge to move to music with others
Event details
All around the world, music is used to connect people, often through shared body movements. Certain types of music are herein better suited for eliciting and coordinating body movements than others. The pleasurable urge to move to music is a uniquely human experience that follows an inverted U-shaped relationship with rhythmic complexity: compared to simple and complex rhythms, moderately complex rhythms induce the strongest pleasurable urge to move. The connection between ratings of social bonding in interpersonal interactions that feature music and rhythmic complexity exhibits a comparable inverted U-shaped pattern. I will present research on these inverted U relationships and connect the pleasurable urge to move to music with others to empathy - the ability to understand and share the feelings and experiences of others.
Jan Stupacher
Jan Stupacher is an Assistant Professor at the Center for Music in the Brain at Aarhus University in Denmark. His research interests include rhythm perception and production, sensorimotor synchronization, social interaction in musical contexts, the experience of flow in musical activities, and the pleasurable urge to move to music, also known as the experience of groove. He holds a PhD in Psychology from the University of Graz, Austria, and received a DOC doctoral fellowship from the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) and an Erwin Schrödinger postdoctoral fellowship from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF).