The vibration mode of electric machines is an important characteristic of vibration, which is useful for finding the vibration sources with different frequencies, but has always been neglected before. In this paper, the vibration characteristics, especially the vibration mode, of permanent magnet (PM) brush DC motors are studied. First, the air gap flux density distribution and radial force density distribution are derived in detail and compared with the results of the finite-element method. Then, two types of vibration modes, called pulsating and bending modes, and their reasons as pulsating force and bending moment are analyzed and elaborated, which have not been analyzed and verified sufficiently before. In addition, the relationships between these two vibrations and pole width, pole number, and slot number are analyzed. The main modal shapes and their frequencies are acquired from the modal test. To confirm the analysis and theory, the multiprobe mode-included test method of vibration acceleration is proposed and emphasized to obtain the vibration mode information of motors, and the experimental results on a PM brush DC motor match well with the simulation results.