sound coming from both speakers and headphone

Using a “standstill” paradigm, we have shown that music may lead to spontaneous body movement, albeit at a very small scale (Jensenius et al., 2017 González Sánchez et al., 2018 González Sánchez et al., 2019). We have been interested in understanding more about how music may induce body movement also when people try not to move. Many of the existing studies in the field of embodied music cognition have focused on fairly large-scale body movement, such as, people dancing (Toiviainen et al., 2010 Burger et al., 2013) or walking (Styns et al., 2007 Van Dyck et al., 2015). This can be seen in a growing amount of research on music-related body movement, both in performance and perception (Gritten and King, 2006, 2011). Thinking about music cognition as a process that happens not only in the mind, but also in the body, is becoming increasingly popular in empirical music research (Leman, 2007). This should be taken into account when designing embodied music cognition studies. We conclude that the playback method impacts the level of body motion observed when people are listening to music. Correlations between participants' demographics, listening habits, and self-reported body motion were observed in both listening conditions. The headphones condition was also reported as being more tiresome by the participants. The results show that the participants on average moved more when listening through headphones. An optical motion capture system was used to calculate their quantity of motion, and a set of questionnaires collected data about music preferences, listening habits, and the experimental sessions. Each participant listened to all the stimuli using both headphones and speakers. The six different stimuli were 45 s each and ranged from a simple pulse to excerpts from electronic dance music (EDM).

But are spontaneous movement responses to music similar if the stimuli are presented using headphones or speakers? This article presents results from an exploratory study in which 35 participants listened to rhythmic stimuli while standing in a neutral position.

Previous studies have shown that music may lead to spontaneous body movement, even when people try to stand still.

Sound coming from both speakers and headphone