Sometimes it’s a whole scene, but sometimes the only reason for a new chapter is comic timing. Or to shove more jokes in the chapter titles, of course. So I wouldn’t say they were discrete, as a break could come in the middle of a scene.

Seeing Vonnegut use chapter breaks for all sorts of purposes — dramatic, comic timing, scene breaks, suspense, etc — really encouraged me to use shorter chapters in some of my own writing, along with some of the techniques. Just like metadata is data, chapter breaks, line breaks, and white space are text. Of course the more you use it for tricks, the more you see the fourth wall, which might not match your tone — like all techniques there’s always a trade-off. More tonally serious works that use short chapters tend to avoid chapter titles, for instance.