1 Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada. connorrichard.spiech@concordia.ca.
2 Montreal Centre for Brain, Music and Sound (BRAMS), Montreal, QC, Canada. connorrichard.spiech@concordia.ca.
3 Centre for Research in Brain, Language and Music (CRBLM), Montreal, QC, Canada. connorrichard.spiech@concordia.ca.
4 RITMO Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies in Rhythm, Time and Motion, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.
5 Department of Musicology, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.
6 Centre for Precision Psychiatry, Division of Mental Health and Addiction, Institute of Clinical Medicine, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway.
7 Department of Psychology, Concordia University, Montreal, QC, Canada.
8 Montreal Centre for Brain, Music and Sound (BRAMS), Montreal, QC, Canada.
9 Centre for Research in Brain, Language and Music (CRBLM), Montreal, QC, Canada.

The pleasurable urge to move to music, termed "groove," is thought to arise from the tension between top-down metric expectations or predictions and rhythmic complexity. Specifically, groove ratings are highest for moderately complex rhythms, balancing expectation and surprise. To test this, meter and rhythmic complexity need to be manipulated independently to assess their impact on groove. Thus, we compared Western listeners' ratings for musical clips of varying rhythmic complexity composed in either the most common Western meter (4/4) or less common meters (e.g., 7/8). In several behavioral studies (Experiment 1, N = 143; Experiment 2, N = 120; Experiment 3, N = 120), we used Bayesian regression to show that groove is greatest for moderately complex rhythms, but only in 4/4. In non-4/4 meters, simpler rhythms elicited the greatest groove. This provides support for the theory that bottom-up rhythmic features interact with meter in a way that shapes the pleasurable urge to move to music.