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Ghost notes are ubiquitous in the rhythm of popular music: quiet notes or beats played between louder ones, filling in the metric grid. Nina Düvel's qualitative expert interviews with drummers explore for the first time why musicians use them and how they relate to the perception of groove in listening. The resulting theses can serve as a basis for further research. She is also conducting a quantitative study of the influence of ghost notes in drum patterns on the perception of groove. Whether ghost notes enhance the sense of groove depends on factors such as tempo, the metric level of the pattern or the musical experience of the listener.