A new study published in PLOS One has found that individuals with musical anhedonia — a condition where people feel little or no pleasure from music — still report a strong desire to move when listening to rhythmic music. This urge to move appears to generate its own form of pleasure, even in the absence of the typical reward experienced from listening to music. The findings suggest that the sensation of “groove” — the pleasurable feeling that makes us want to dance — may stem more from our drive to move than from the direct enjoyment of the music itself.
Previous studies have shown that the feelings of enjoyment and the desire to move to music are highly correlated. Yet they’ve also hinted that these sensations may rely on different brain mechanisms. The current study took this question a step further by examining a group of people who don’t feel musical pleasure and asking whether they still experience the urge to move — and if that urge could produce its own rewarding experience.
“I, myself, am a musician, and I’ve spent a lot of time enjoying, creating, and seeking out the pleasurable urge to move to music in my free time,” said study author Isaac Romkey, a PhD student at Concordia University and member of the Penhune Laboratory for Motor Learning and Neural Plasticity. “This study centered on trying to dissociate the two components of groove, pleasure and urge to move.”
For their study, the researchers recruited 204 participants through an online platform. Seventeen of these individuals were identified as having specific musical anhedonia, meaning they had a selective lack of pleasure in music, but not in other rewarding activities like eating or socializing. The rest served as controls, including a subset that was matched to the musical anhedonia group by age, gender, and musical experience.
To identify those with musical anhedonia, participants completed the Barcelona Music Reward Questionnaire, a tool used in previous studies to classify people based on their musical reward sensitivity. The researchers also ruled out alternative explanations like depression or global anhedonia (a general inability to experience pleasure), and screened for basic musical perception skills such as pitch recognition and beat synchronization. This ensured that any differences observed weren’t due to hearing impairments, motor deficits, or overall lack of musical exposure.
Participants then listened to short, computer-generated musical clips that varied in two key musical features: rhythmic complexity and harmonic complexity. Some rhythms were simple and predictable, while others were syncopated or more unpredictable. Likewise, the harmonic content ranged from basic chords to more complex, dissonant ones. After each clip, participants rated how much pleasure they felt and how much the music made them want to move, using a five-point scale. The researchers were especially interested in whether musical anhedonics would show different patterns of response from controls.
As expected from previous research, the control group showed the strongest responses — both in pleasure and desire to move — when listening to music with moderate rhythmic complexity. This follows a well-known inverted U-shaped pattern: music that’s too simple is boring, while overly complex rhythms are hard to follow. Mid-level syncopation strikes the right balance between surprise and predictability, which tends to produce the most groove. Harmonic complexity had a similar, though more linear, effect: simpler chords were generally preferred.
The group with musical anhedonia showed some surprising results. Although they reported lower overall pleasure ratings compared to the control group, their urge to move was remarkably intact. Like the controls, they showed peak responses to medium rhythmic complexity, and their movement ratings closely matched those of the control group. This suggests that while they may not feel typical musical pleasure, they still engage with rhythmic stimuli on a motor level.
“We were surprised that individuals with musical anhedonia showed the same ratings,” Romkey told PsyPost.
But the most striking finding came from the mediation analyses. In the musical anhedonia group, the urge to move completely explained the little pleasure they did report. In other words, the desire to move wasn’t just intact — it was actually driving their limited pleasurable experience. By contrast, in the control group, both the music itself and the urge to move contributed to the pleasure, indicating a more complex interaction between these two components of groove.
These results suggest that the pleasure people derive from groove may not always stem from musical appreciation in the traditional sense. Instead, the desire to move — a response tied to motor circuits in the brain — can be a powerful source of enjoyment on its own. This aligns with theories of predictive coding, which argue that we find pleasure in music when it strikes a balance between fulfilling and violating our expectations. Moving to the beat may help us resolve these prediction errors, reinforcing motor patterns and rewarding the brain’s effort to sync up with the rhythm.
“The pleasure we receive from music appears to be multifaceted; we can get pleasure from many different aspects of music, and the type of pleasure that the component of music evokes is different as well,” Romkeys aid.
Interestingly, prior brain imaging studies have shown that the dorsal striatum, a region involved in movement and habit learning, is more active when people feel the urge to move to music. This contrasts with the ventral striatum, which is typically linked to reward and pleasure. The current findings add behavioral evidence to this neural distinction, supporting the idea that groove is rooted in motor planning as much as — or perhaps more than — in musical enjoyment.
The study has several strengths, including a rigorous screening process for musical anhedonia and a large, diverse sample tested online using standardized musical stimuli. However, the authors acknowledge a few limitations.
“Mediation analyses are not causal, meaning that they do not prove anything on their own,” Romkey noted. “These analyses should be thought of as an indication of where future research should grow towards. As well, we used simple piano chords for our stimuli. We may see different results with more ecologically valid stimuli.”
In addition, the group of musical anhedonics was small, and their diagnosis relied on behavioral questionnaires rather than clinical assessments.
Despite these limitations, the study offers a new perspective on how music moves us. It suggests that the desire to move may be a more universal and resilient form of musical engagement than previously thought — one that can persist even when other sources of musical pleasure are absent. This has implications not only for understanding musical anhedonia but also for developing music-based therapies that harness movement to improve well-being.
“The next steps in this line of research are to investigate the relationship between the brain connectivity of those with and without musical anhedonia and groove ratings,” Romkey said. “We are hypothesizing that those with musical anhedonia will have their groove relationship maintained via connections to motor planning networks, as opposed to reward networks of the brain.”
The study, “The pleasurable urge to move to music is unchanged in people with musical anhedonia,” was authored by Isaac D. Romkey, Tomas Matthews, Nicholas Foster, Simone Dalla Bella, and Virginia B. Penhune.