Your body is already predicting
Why Is It Hard to Sit Still to Music?
A steady beat lets your brain know exactly when the next sound lands, and knowing makes moving nearly free.
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Step 1 of 5
Your brain is always guessing what comes next.
Leave one beat out and the brain answers it as strongly as a played one. Hearing is not a recording. Your brain runs a little ahead of the sound, guessing what arrives next, and it notices hardest when the guess turns out wrong.
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Step 2 of 5
A steady beat makes the guessing easy.
Two is enough. Everything after that comes free. Two evenly spaced hits are enough to fix a rate. From there your brain can say when every future hit will land, before any of them happen.
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Step 3 of 5
Landing on the beat means starting before it.
Muscles take about a fifth of a second to answer. Clapping on the beat means deciding ahead of the beat, which is only possible because you already knew it was coming.
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Step 4 of 5
Which is why music with no pulse leaves people sitting.
Take away the steady beat and the prediction has nothing to lock onto. Such music can be beautiful and can be gripping, and rooms stay still through it.
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Step 5 of 5
Everyone in the room predicts the same instant.
That is why a crowd moves together without arranging anything. Each person runs the same guess off the same beat, so they all arrive at the same moment.
The short version
You move to music because a steady beat lets your brain predict the next hit — and since muscles are slow, only a predicted beat can be landed on at all.
Try it yourself
Try clapping on the very first beat of a song you have never heard. You cannot, and you are on time by the third — the moment prediction has something to work with.