A groove brain-music interface for enhancing individual experience of urge to move

When we listen to music, we often feel a pleasurable urge to move to music, known as groove. While previous studies have identified musical features that contribute to the groove experience, such as syncopation and tempo, they also report individual differences in which kinds of music people experience groove. Therefore, recommending groove-eliciting music requires accounting for individual differences. In this study, we aimed to develop a groove brain-music interface (G-BMI) that generates personalized playlists to maximize each individual’s groove experience, using a neurofeedback system based on in-ear EEG. Twenty-four participants listened to three high-groove and three low-groove musical excerpts and rated their “urge to move.” Using these ratings and the recorded EEG, we trained two LASSO models to build the G-BMI. Model 1 predicted urge to move from acoustic features extracted with VGGish, a pretrained neural network. Model 2 classified EEG data as recorded during listening to high-groove or low-groove music. Using Model 1, we ranked 7,225 candidate songs by predicted groove and assembled one groove-augmenting and one groove-diminishing playlist. Using Models 1 and 2, we created two additional playlists that updated Model 1 and the ranking in real-time based on in-ear EEG. Participants then listened to all four playlists and rated them on items including “urge to move.” The groove-augmenting playlist that incorporated EEG achieved the highest “urge to move” ratings. These findings suggest that a personalized neurofeedback system employing EEG can help maximize individual groove experience.