“Expectancy violations (e.g., harmonic, rhythmic, and/or melodic violations) are strongly correlated to the onset of musical frisson, such that some level of violated expectation may be a prerequisite.”
Interesting. The Spotify playlist didn't do much for me, but when I think of a couple moments in songs that always give me chills, they all feature that pattern:
Nightwish, Ghost Love Score, Wacken 2013 @ 9:22, affectionately nicknamed the "Floor-gasm" by fans. The melody line feels like it's already gone as high as she can possibly go and is just going to descend by a couple notes. Instead she takes it up another 5th to what feels like an impossibly high note, and then holds it there.
Dream Theater, A Change of Seasons, @ 13:01 and again @ 13:28. It follows one of the odd-time-signatures, chromatic-only jam sessions, and then the band teases an end multiple times starting @ 12:40. When the jam session finally resolves into 4/4 time and the guitar comes in with those held power chords, you're like "Ahhh...." and then just as you start grooving along to that rhythm, the guitars/bass/drums drop out entirely and it's just acapella vocals over keys.
The famous frisson moment in this recording is at 2m57: "as it was". Three reasons. One is the shifting chords in the organ part and the tenor/bass parts that lead up to it (the "expectancy violations"). The second is just the pure thrill of trebles soaring to a top A like that. And the third you only get if you listened to the Magnificat beforehand, which in its natural environment - a service of choral Evensong - you would: the "as it was" in the Gloria of the Nunc is _almost_ exactly the same as it was in the Mag... just a beat later. Pure "expectancy violation" again.
Howells is full of these moments. The big, crunchy, discordant Amen in the Gloria of the Magdalen Service is my favourite - where the harmonies are offset by a crescendo/diminuendo/crescendo sequence in the choir, all on the same note.
> Expectancy violations (e.g., harmonic, rhythmic, and/or melodic violations) are strongly correlated to the onset of musical frisson
Listening to Funkadelic's Maggot Brain album while under the influence of strong hallucinogens turned my regular frissons into full blown waves of pleasure in my body, which I remember were directly correlated to harmony, call-and-response and the play of consonance and dissonance that's so taken for granted in music.
A dissonant chord would make me tense up, and the subsequent resolution would just feel like a blanket of warm pleasure rolling over me.
Love seeing Dream Theater on HN. The first I heard of the term "frisson" was a discussion on the dream theater forums, and I was interested to see that some people don't experience it at all.
Another DT song moment that gets me is in Scarred, climaxing with the lyric "Sometimes I feel I should face this alone, My soul exposed, It calms me to know that I won't".
Awake is one of DTs best album, I’m a huge fan of Jordan Rudess but listening to Awake there’s just that “something special” that Kevin Moore added to the band that is indescribable and unmatchable.
I suppose that's also how songs wear out with time and/or repeated listens. Fittingly, any frisson seems to be the first to go.
I'll contribute Stellenbosch University Choir's rendition of Say Something (by A Great Big World and Christina Aguilera). The arrangement capitalizes on the choir's dynamic range; by remaining relatively soft throughout, the sudden loud, tutti passages (1:38 & 3:51) have great effect.
I find that choral performances of pop songs work really well, though they're regrettably but understandably rare. Interestingly, the focus on dynamics isn't present in the original, duet, or Pentatonix version of Say Something, so no frisson moments there. Someone listed Bohemian Rhapsody--can also compare with Stellenbosch's version:
(10 days later...for the record): Turns out choral covers of pop songs are more common than I'd remembered. It's just that the most relevant search term is popchoir/pop choir, which wasn't obvious to me until I noticed it used in several video titles in sequence. These tend to be performed by less formal community choirs, which makes sense. And though many have mic setups, the point about choirs being difficult to record still applies.
The interesting bit is that many European languages have converged on the same juxtaposition of the lexemes <pop><choir>, with the former consistently being a loanword from English. That is, there are lots of search results to be found by translating literally to terms like popchor (German), popkoor (Dutch), поп-хор (several Slavic languages), or popcoro (several Romance languages), plus hyphen and space variations.
One of my favourites is Symptom of the universe by Black Sabbath.
It's a classic Sabbath style tune with a hard hitting riff, solid drums, vocals and all that. The song seems to be winding down after the 4 minute mark with a standard fade out.
It feels like this is an example of a song structure that frequently leads to frisson, where you have a standard pop song (verse-chorus, repeated about 3x, maybe a solo), a long instrumental part that feels like an outtro and often has irregular rhythms or key changes...and then the song reconvenes with a vocal part that's either a small variation on the original pop song or something totally different. Other examples of this pattern:
This is a common thing in the Metalcore scene at least around 2005 - 2010. All That Remains, Shadows Fall, Killswitch Engage, etc. It's still pretty common though. Very heavy music followed by super melodic choruses. Some songs even feature acoustic bridges and instrumentals. The contrast between verse and chorus really pays off the listener.
Always fun to see Dream Theater brough up outside of fan forums, they’ve been my favorite band for over 20 years.
A Change of Seasons is one of the greatest compositions of all time, in my opinion.
Breaking All Illusions is another track that just gives “that feeling” though it’s a bit “musically dense” so it might take a few listens to really digest it for some.
Disappear and The Spirit Carries On are also the only songs that have ever made me cry like a baby.
You need to be at least a little bit in the mood to give this effect a chance I guess. If you play the songs on your phone in between finishing breakfast and taking a dump, not much will happen. I know some of the songs on that list gave me that feeling in the past, now I only need to find some time to give the others a try.
> when I think of a couple moments in songs that always give me chills
There are a couple of songs giving me chills when I'm singing them myself. Not every time, only when I'm in a appropriate mood. So expectation violation doesn't seem a cause.
I don't know exactly what "contrasive valence" is, but it sounds more like it. I think my chills correlate with a qualitative change in an emotions. The short moment when one emotion is transformed into other induce frisson. Some change in a way how I interpret things, or how I feel about them, or both. It must correlate with some properties of a music, because it is one of the ways to change emotional content, but it is not the cause. Sometimes it is one of the causes in a chain of causes.
Thinking about it, not every transformation of emotions gives me chills, sometimes I get tears in my eyes without any chills.
> Nightwish, Ghost Love Score, Wacken 2013 @ 9:22, affectionately nicknamed the "Floor-gasm" by fans.
I saw Floor Jansen live last month. It was to a different song, but it was the first time ever that live music gave me goosebumps. And I've seen a lot of live music.
I remember discovering this phenomenon in high school and my buddy dubbed it a metalgasm, when you feel the blood draining from your face, the goosebumps and all of those other feelings.
A few years later I launched metalgasm.com (early 2000s), it is offline now, but it was a place to record your metalgasms or frissons (which I never had heard of until now) with timestamps so people could explore new metal and sort by sub-genre tag and know which songs are the most metalgasmic and which parts to look out for. There is so much to discover and sometimes you think you don't like a genre, but you just haven't found the right band or songs to get you started.
I can tell you that Ghost Love Score had the most entries and Dream Theater made up most of the rest of the site. It's fun to look through what's still on the Internet Archive. Maybe I should rebuild and launch the site again for fun.
One of the definitive examples has to be Radiohead's How to Disappear Completely [1]. 2 or 3 great frisson moments in there. The big one is toward the end, when the strings decay and smudge into atonal textures (very very heavily influenced by the 20th-century composer Penderecki) and then suddenly come back into focus as the song climaxes.
It's just so incredibly well-done that I feel like even people who only listen to classical and jazz, or whatever, would have to acknowledge they really landed something there.
Intro to Money for nothing gets me every time. When the chaos resolves to that crunchy riff i get chills. You need to listen to it where the drums are actually hitting you though.
If you like that, I suspect you'd enjoy Breaking Into Heaven[1] by The Stone Roses. It is a much longer walk (as in a few minutes long), but I highly recommend sitting through the chaos until it resolves, as you say.
I notice that most frisson moments have a nostalgia connection for me, possibly unlocking the feeling I had experiencing that thing at a younger age when everything seemed more awesome.
I'll reply with the best examples I know. It's likely that this phenomenon is very personal, though.
Carlo Gesualdo, Tenebrae Responsories. Three nights full of "Expectancy violations", unparalleled word painting, cross relations... definitely do reference the text in translation, because the word painting is a huge part of the beauty of the work.
I too was thinking about Ghost Love Score. I get it especially when watching reaction videos when noticing that others are getting it. So, it might not just due to the music itself, but also be a social/emotional effect. I have literally have weekends where I only watched reaction videos and got it over and over again.
My favourite moment in Ghost Love Score is much earlier in the song, at t=158, "into the blue memory". That transition and the melodic line following it ("still I write...everything I may ever be") is pure gold.
+1 for Dream Theatre. Progressive metal is my number one source of Frisson. Brutal, heavy lows followed by soaring, melodic highs really does it for me.
Before I learned of the name frisson, I always thought it was an adrenaline response.
Thanks for mentioning that Nightwish song. I hadn't listened to them in 18 years or so and I completely missed that they switched vocalists again. She's utterly amazing and her stage presence is formidable.
That Nightwish video already gets into the flow half a minute before peaking at the time stamp. Very effective. The Dream Theater track does nothing for me, it sounds too clean cut.
Afaict, frission isn't a quality of music itself, but rather a chill-like response you may have while listening to certain songs. If you get frission while you listen to a song, then yes, it counts as frission to you.
Edit: but yes, this key shift is rather beautiful and unexpected.
What a surprise reading your comment citing Nightwish! When I read the post headline, I immediately thought about the Nightwish song "Amaranth". It was really the most powerful, memorable and long lasting frisson I had ever experienced.
I'm not that into metal bands, but I figured I'd give your examples a listen. At first I didn't think much of it, but right at 9:22 when she hits that note... frisson!
Interesting. The Spotify playlist didn't do much for me, but when I think of a couple moments in songs that always give me chills, they all feature that pattern:
Nightwish, Ghost Love Score, Wacken 2013 @ 9:22, affectionately nicknamed the "Floor-gasm" by fans. The melody line feels like it's already gone as high as she can possibly go and is just going to descend by a couple notes. Instead she takes it up another 5th to what feels like an impossibly high note, and then holds it there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47e_961OQWE#t=528
Dream Theater, A Change of Seasons, @ 13:01 and again @ 13:28. It follows one of the odd-time-signatures, chromatic-only jam sessions, and then the band teases an end multiple times starting @ 12:40. When the jam session finally resolves into 4/4 time and the guitar comes in with those held power chords, you're like "Ahhh...." and then just as you start grooving along to that rhythm, the guitars/bass/drums drop out entirely and it's just acapella vocals over keys.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZKrwJzGg0k#t=730