Cohoes High research: familiarity, not personal preference, most strongly predicts how much students "groove" to a song

Kalia Filbert, a senior student researcher at Cohoes High School, presented a study examining how familiarity, preference and auditory attention affect listeners’ perception of a song’s “groovability” (the pleasurable desire to move to music).

Filbert played 28 music excerpts (about 30 seconds each) spanning genres from pop and electronic to jazz and classical and had students rate whether they would dance to the music, listen to it and play it at parties. She said familiarity with a song correlated strongly with higher groove ratings (reported r ≈ 0.689), while personal genre preference showed a weaker relationship (r ≈ 0.2285).

Filbert summarized that popular genres such as pop and electronic music received higher mean groove scores, and that students were more likely to rate a song as “groovy” when they recognized it. She noted that a participant’s stated preference for a genre did not necessarily predict higher groove ratings for that genre’s excerpts.

Methods included classroom distribution of questionnaires on Chromebooks and a 1–5 Likert scale for three groove‑related items. Filbert said sample size was about 150 participants originally targeted, but she cited limitations including actual participant numbers closer to 150 and potential response bias from required class participation.

In conclusion, Filbert recommended further research into individual listener traits (for example, whether a person habitually uses music for emotional regulation) and larger, more diverse samples to refine understanding of how familiarity, attention and preference interact to shape groove perception.