Emotion in music, giving you the chills | Hacker News Reader

Emotion in music, giving you the chills

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Frission[0] is the academic term for chills experienced while listening to music (and or exposure to other stimuli).

There's a subreddit[1] in case anyone is curious about the various frission triggers people report. IMO the subreddit is interesting because people evidently experience frission from a surprising variety of things.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisson

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Frisson

Frisson, not frission. I’d say is literary than academic.

Thanks. I was wondering why gBoard was trying to correct me. My comment was too hastily written.

It’s French. ;)

frisson is the french word for chills

Thank you a lot! I've been experiencing this since I was a kid. Specially in orquestral soundtracks like "The breaking of the fellowship" but also in electronic music like "Ode to joy" from Savant or "Herz an herz" from Blümchen.

The anticipation of the climax of this songs give me chills that go way beyond what an orgasm feels like.

You should listen to the full first movement of Beethoven's 5th Symphony. It's one of the most popular pieces of music in history, and for good reason!

For a more modern one, Apocalyptica's Nothing Else Matters (the Official Video on YouTube is the exact version) is one of the most memorable frisson experiences I've had in recent years. After I first heard it while dancing I listened to it for like a week straight and got frisson at the climax basically every single time.

I can't believe I never listened the whole piece. It has been an awesome experience! Thank you!

Gustav Holst’s Jupiter always does it for me. It’s absolutely sublime. I have to skip it when I’m working because otherwise I’ll have to take a break to bask in the glow of the song’s crescendo.

Thanks for the resource. My first thought was, I bet some people get frisson by watching at mathematical formulas. And then I realized I had that once at a numberphile video about the mandelbrot set.

The only music that has ever given me chills (and still does every time) is the Donkey Kong soundtrack. Listening to it every day and never gets old.

how long have you been listening to it every day? I find that I do this with music but then burn out after a couple months and it doesn't hit the same unless I take a 5+ year break

I would guess compared to purely visual art (paintings, sculpture), music creates stronger activity in the brain. Whatever the reason, music seems much more capable of creating feeling than purely visual art. It follows that anyone who only paints or sculpts is practicing a lesser form of art and deserves the shame and derision of musicians (who are superior).

I think it is interesting they express music as some sort of universal when deaf people exist, and there are even able bodied people who just do not like music.

Communication tends to be easier when people just say what they have to say, instead of qualifying every single statement with every possible exception that could ever exist.

Deaf people can feel the music at various degrees. Some deaf people even quite famously were composers themselves.

Also, not liking music doesn't mean you don't feel anything. And lastly, some people indeed have an inability of feeling but that typically extends beyond the realm of music, so it does not remove anything from the statement of the author.

I have musical anhedonia. Music does absolutely nothing for me. No emotional response at all. In my 50+ years of life I have never heard a single piece of music that gives me the chills, unless by that phrase we mean that all the music leaves me cold.

But, to the best of my knowledge this doesn’t extend beyond the realm of music for me. Though, on other odd thing about me is that I do not dream at night. At least, I’ve never woken up and remembered dreaming. I do have a vivid imagination during the day. I’m not sure if the non-music and non-dreaming are related or not. Other than those two things, I think I’m completely normal.

This is quite fascinating. Would love to hear more.

Have you ever enjoyed any music whatsoever? What about movies? Reading fiction? Looking at art / photography?

I’ve never enjoyed any music. I do enjoy movies, reading fiction, creating and looking at art, etc.

does the addition of a soundtrack help you enjoy movies? surely that is part of the whole package.

Have you ever seen those videos where they take out the music track from a movie clip but leave everything else? The point it to show how much better the music ads to the movie. But it is fine for me without the music. I’d actually prefer it without the music since I find the music often makes it more difficult to understand what people are saying.

Do you enjoy soundscapes in movies? Sometimes I get the chills at the sound of the wind blowing, rain, etc. What Im trying to determine is whether it is music or general sound your brain circuitry doesn’t care to release dopamine..

You are not alone. I too do not feel any kind of emotional influence from music, at least not any different than it would be if the words were read.

I do however dream at night 10-12 dreams a night.

Thanks for sharing. I wrongly assumed that it could not come isolated. The specificity makes even more interesting.

If you have resources to share beyond your own experience, they'd be welcome.

Is it any kind of music? There are so many kinds of music in the world, perhaps one of them resonates with you?

For me, it is very different. Almost any genre of music can move me. As for dreams I can even dream when I’m only half asleep. Not sure there is a connection.

I’ve never heard any sort of music that moves me. Maybe there is one, but I haven’t heard it yet.

It's still a widespread as human phenomenon though.

You should watch a movie, "It's All Gone Pete Tong"

It's about a deaf DJ

when people say music is a universal, they mean that music is universal in all human cultures. that a small %age of people in this culture or that culture don't like music doesn't stop it from being a cultural universal. (if there is a parsing of a sentence that means what the speaker means and is true, that's good enough, and whether someone can find an alternate parsing which fails might be interesting, but doesn't take away from the intended meaning)

Yes, they write as if it's common sense (which isn't, as some don't have it) that when people generalize (of course, not all people), and that everybody understands (well, not really everybody, but many) that all things have exceptions (well, not all, but many. Some things don't have exceptions, e.g. some mathematical axioms), but it's still useful (except when it's harmful of course) to generalize for the most common case, and not give a laundry list (of course I'm speaking metaphorically, I don't refer to an actual list of laundry items) of exceptions every time we say something...

It's obvious (well, not to everybody, but to a certain large number of people) that instead they should include the cartesian product of all possible exception as extra qualification of their statement...

And God forbid (not actual God of course, as he don't exist) that somebody writes something like "Alaska is cold" when there are places in Alaska, like the inside of ovens and saunas, that are objectively quite warm (though, of course, not as warm as the Sun)...

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