Frisson

Do you ever listen to a song and get the chills? Not the chills but the chills. I do. It’s not often that it happens but when it does, it’s fantastic. There are a few songs that pretty reliably give me the chills. Here’s one. Here’s another. Here’s one more for good measure. It turns out that there’s a fancy, technical term for this phenomenon - frisson. To my surprise and great joy, frisson is actually a fairly well-understood sensation and is the topic of this Key Notes podcast. Cole Cuchna and neuroscientist, Indre Viskontas, break down what makes certain songs induce frisson in their listeners. Turns out it has a lot to do with everyone’s favourite neurotransmitter, dopamine. So, in general, it seems like a necessary condition for a collection of sounds to count as ‘music’ seems to be the fact that they’re arranged in some relatively predictable, repeating pattern. Our brain picks up on these patterns and derives pleasure from them. However, that doesn’t explain why not all music induces frisson. We get the chills when our brain expects to hear a predictable melodic or rhythmic pattern but, importantly, has those expectations violated. In many frisson-inducing songs, you usually hear an ascending melody with relatively small intervals between notes followed, not by a predictable resolution, but by a modulation or a large, possibly dissonant melodic leap or a beat switch or something else. This feeling of expecting a resolution and having your expectation subverted corresponds pretty well with activation in two key parts of our dopaminergic system - the caudate (the bit that’s most active during the build-up) and the nucleus accumbens (the bit that’s active when you experience the chills).

I think it’s amazing that air vibrating at specific frequencies in regular patterns can elicit such a potent emotional response in humans. Music is a powerful thing and I hope to better understand how and why it influences us in such unexpected ways.