From the Vault: Musical Frisson

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind. My name
is Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and it's Saturday.
Time for an episode from the Vault. This one originally
aired June tenth, and this is the episode that our
producer Seth and I did on musical free Son that
feeling when you get shivers or goose bumps from listening
to music. Uh so, yeah, we hope you enjoy. Welcome

(00:32):
to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, production of My Heart Radio. Hello,
and welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind. I'm Joe
McCormick and my regular co host Robert Lamb is not
with us today. He is out on vacation, but as
a special treat I am being joined by our in

(00:52):
house audio sorcerer, Seth Nicholas Johnson. Say Hi Seth, Hello, everyone,
it's me Seth. How are you doing today? I'm doing great,
happy to be on this side of the microphone, happy
to help out with while Roberts out of town. And
I'm very happy, um with the subject matter that you
chose today. So I'm looking forward to this right We're
so we're doing a musical themed episode today. Um, because Seth,

(01:15):
you host another podcast. Do you want to tell listeners
who are not familiar with the Record Store Society what
it's all about? Surely? Um yeah. So obviously the main
chunk of my time I spend producing this show stuff
to blow your mind. But I also do a weekly
show with that I host with my co host, Tara Davies,
and it's called Record Store Society, and um, basically, it's

(01:36):
a podcast for music nerds, by music nerds, and it's um,
full blown, just a talk show where people can just
share recommendations things we've been listening to lately, what we love,
play some music based games that you can't really play
with other people because you're going very specific and very
nerdy about your music tastes. But we pretend we're in

(01:57):
a record store the whole time. That's the gimmick. That's
the fun little gimmick where we just uh uh yeah,
there's we have sound effects and all of our guests
are customers and me and my co host are the
employees of the record store and uh yeah, it's fun.
It's called Record Store Society and you can find it
wherever you find your podcasts. It's a great show, folks.
I personally recommended in fact, Rob and I did a

(02:19):
guest episode where we appeared on Record Store Society one time.
How long ago is that now? Is a couple of
months ago where we ended up talking. Yeah, it was
music videos. Yes, it was a great one and m Yeah,
tons of fun everyone. If if anyone's in the mood
for music talk, if you're looking for new music recommendations,
or you just feel kind of lonely that you don't
none of your friends, will you know, go on a

(02:40):
deep dive about, you know, bootleg Neil Young albums. Then
you know you can listen to Record Store Society and
well we'll scratch that itch. Speaking of bootleg Neil Young albums,
you ever see that video where he's like going around
in record stores and he's finding bootlegs and he's like
taking them without paying. Yes, I mean you love it.

(03:01):
You know, there's something about a musical curmudgeon that always
makes me very happy. And he's a good one. He's
a very good musical curmudgeon. Yeah, yeah, it's great. He
like takes it up. He's like, I'm on this record
and I don't know what this is. Um, But so anyway,
because Seth of the Record Store Society is joining us today.
We thought we would talk about a musical topic, and

(03:21):
I think we've got a really interesting one that ties
up with neuroscience, big puzzles about how our brains work, emotions,
the reward system in the brain, music and aesthetics and
fear and UH and the autonomic nervous system and all that,
and so what we're talking about today is those moments
when music is not just fun or interesting or intellectually pleasurable,

(03:46):
but when musical pleasure sort of grabs you at the
level of the body, when it sends a shiver down
your spine, or when it causes tingling on your skin
or even feeling like it's under your skin, or when
it raises goose by umps on your forearms or on
your neck, or when it puts a lump in your throat. Today,
we're going to be talking about what is sometimes called

(04:08):
free san or frisson uh in the words of one review.
We're going to be looking at today it is a
transcendent psycho physiological moment of musical experience. It's the it's
the moment where music grabs you by the body and
not just the mind. Now, Sathe you actually suggested this
topic when we were batting around ideas about what to

(04:29):
do today. Do you remember how this came to your mind?
What's the story here? Um, it's a concept I very much. Um,
I've done mild research into into the past. I'm a
person who feels for song or however we're going to pronounce.
How do you think you're going to pronounce it today, Joe, Well, dang,
I've already been thinking, so I've been saying in my head.

(04:49):
Free song comes from the French comes from a French
word meaning shiver, shiver is a now and like he
gave me a shiver. But but I've seen plenty of
people also all it frissan so or frossan. So we're
probably gonna jump around, but I'll try to be as
annoying as possible about it. But I'll try to go
with frees on as well. Um yeah, yeah, and um

(05:11):
aesthetic chills is the is my favorite definition of freesan.
And um, it's something I experience a lot. And as
a big music fan, I've often thought, am I a
big music fan because I acutely feel freesan very often?
Or do I experience frees on often because I'm such

(05:33):
a big music fan and I spend so much of
my time listening to and thinking about it and diving
deep and spending all my money on records and blah
blah blah. Like it's a Chicken or the egg situation,
which I don't think we can ever have an answer to,
but it's an interesting idea. And um, I've also not
too long ago learned that, of course, not everyone experiences it,

(05:53):
which is another very strange aspect. When you feel something
that you enjoy, like just like whether it be you know, um,
the taste of something sour and you go, oh, other
people don't taste sour, and you would go, wait a minute.
I thought everyone had this, And that's that's kind of
what I felt when I learned that frees on isn't
something that everyone experiences. And anyway, you you're so good

(06:15):
at researching things, I thought you would uh answer some
questions for me. So I'm I'm I'm ecstatic with with
what you've looked into already. Well, I don't think we're
going to have full closure on all of the causes
of this of this phenomenon today, but we can raise
some questions and bring up some findings that point off
an interesting directions This is one of those that I

(06:36):
think is still somewhat of a puzzle. But there are
a lot of pieces of it that are on the
table now and you can arrange them around in different
ways and get some ideas of what to do. But
maybe it would be good to start describing really strong
examples that unfortunately necessarily, I think these are going to
have to be subjective. That we will talk about examples

(06:56):
that affect us personally. But one thing you'll find is
that you know, musical passages are especially prone to eliciting
free song in many people, but there's nothing that's universal,
So what gets you might not get somebody else, and
vice versa. Um. But I I specifically have a memory
from when I was in college of I guess a

(07:16):
couple of days, or maybe it was even a stretch
of a week where I was just listening to one
song over and over again. I would like, maybe multiple
times a day, put on my headphones, turn the volume
way up, and just listen to the same song over
and over again with my head bent down and my
eyes closed. It was a song by by Rout that

(07:38):
is called non Taste, and it has this moment where
you know it starts off kind of quiet, and then
suddenly it becomes loud. The rest of the band comes in,
the rhythm kicks in, UH, and there's a there's clicking percussion,
and and when that happens, I would just feel these

(08:06):
waves of tingling and goose bumps, and I would do
it over and over again, almost like I was addicted
to it. It sort of colors my memory of my
experiences of you know, that summer two thousand whatever it was. UH.
And another thing is I was thinking, I still really
love music, but I don't really do things like that anymore.
I would sometimes do that with songs, especially when I

(08:27):
was in high school and college. And it makes me
kind of wonder if age might be a factor in
in how often and how intensely you experience free song,
or in how motivated you are to have the experience
again and again. How does that line up with your
experience It does, However, I would say that I don't
believe mine has waned at all, and I'm not really sure.

(08:50):
I can't explain that either. I can't explain why, um
something that like when I was in like middle school
and high school, I was always the kid with the
largest CD collection. I had like the giant binder full
of CDs and it was the only thing I cared about,
and blah blah blah. And you know that at that
time when music obsession is very very common. I think

(09:11):
most people feel music obsession during those teenage through high school. Yeah,
I guess it's all teenage years. I often had people
tell me, oh, when I was your age, I love
music too, you'll grow out of it. I heard that
again and again and again, and here I am knocking
on middle age, and I haven't really changed too much,
and I just kind of became a different kind of

(09:32):
music fan, I guess, which is now why I host
that music show too, and have hosted other music podcasts
in my life. And that's why I run a record label.
It's why I'm a musician. It's it's all these things
that I do and really enjoy. So yes, I I
fully agree with you that there is this thing that
it must be something like a dopamine release. And we'll
get more into like the specific details about what's happening

(09:54):
chemically and all that kind of stuff later, But no,
I I think I still feel it pretty acutely. I
think I still um do obsess over songs far too much,
and talk about music far too much, and go into
all those things. And um, here's another thing that I'm
not sure if we'll get too later. You and I
are also both musicians in our own ways. You know,

(10:15):
we are people who write, record and play music. Um,
extremely amateur on my part, but yes, but that's still
something that not a lot of people do. And I
wonder if being a musician has something to do with
this as well, something that has to do with that
wiring your brain, that that self serving dopamine plunger, That

(10:36):
that being a rat with a test and hitting the
little buttons you can get your little food pellets. I
can't answer these questions, but that's something that makes me
think of sometimes when I'm playing something over and over
and over again, whether I'm listening to it or with
my hand I'm playing on a musical instrument, I think
about that rats getting a food pellet. Like you're listening
to that Bay Roots song, you know, it's just like

(10:57):
and one more please and one more please. I don't know,
I was trying to think of other songs that I mean,
I know they're there are tons that are just not
coming to mind, but I was making a list while
we were getting ready to record this of moments and
songs that I know regularly caused Free song for me.
One is another one I was thinking of is the
pre chorus in the song Alex Chilton by the Replacements.

(11:18):
Do you know the part I'm talking about where the
the verse transitions to suddenly the background harmonies come in,
coinciding with the lines of the lyrics Children by the
Millions sing for Alex Chilton on that party always does

(11:41):
it for me? Um. I was also thinking about there
is a there's an awesome soul song called into Something
Can't Shake Loose by ov Right where I experienced Free
song multiple points in the song, but especially as the
intro has these chord changes on the piano along with
uh sort of plaintive vocals uh cycling through the same lyrics,

(12:04):
but with with these chord changes leading up to when
the rhythm kicks in and the strings come in. Never
never will a game saying loo no and uh yeah

(12:26):
chills all over from it. I mean, I I think
if you experience this, there definitely um high points that
you can always remember. Like off off top of my head,
there are always a couple of really strong examples UM,
and perhaps some of these examples that we're listing, we'll
be able to actually somewhat dissect and understand why these

(12:47):
examples hold so strong for us. UM. There's a song
called Modern World by Wolf Parade where basically the entire
second half of the song is this building extended chorus.
Ye we're just like you know, it's a it's repetitive,

(13:10):
but maybe like every bar to another instrument is added,
another element is added, and then like you're you're I
I literally feel chills thinking about it right now because
I can hear those notes in my head and there's
something to do with pattern that really really brings you
home and expectation. Um. There's there's also this really great

(13:31):
song UM by Animal Collective called Banshee Beat that's very slow,
very very very UM. It's a it's a languid song,
you know, very stretched out, and then every once in
a while, the lead singer A V. Taire just hits
these notes where he says swimming pool feel, and it's

(13:59):
like it erupts out of him like a volcano would
erupt lava. And it's though those moments as well, they're
there there there, I mean, and I also do think that,
like you were saying before, it's very subjective. UM. For example,
when I was talking about this with my wife Lizzie
last night, and she showed me a Loofer Janya song
and I was like, oh, yeah, I know that song,

(14:21):
and she's like, that's the one for me, that's the
one that gives me the chills. And I'm like, not
a great song, but I've never felt it for that
and and so so I think you are correct where
it is. Just it's a subjective feeling built into us individually,
and sometimes it's shared, but I think quite often it's not.
I think it's very personal most of the time. Yeah,

(14:41):
it's an interesting phenomenon that seems to involve both cognitive
and emotional elements. Like it's cognitive in that uh sort
of sort of knowledge and context matters, and like it
it matters how much attention you're paying to the music,
Like music that's on in the background is usually unlikely
to cause free song. I don't know if you have
the same experience. It's especially when you're really listening actively

(15:02):
that it happens, especially at higher volume. UM. But the
other thing is that it sometimes it gets the better
of you, or at least in my experience, I can
get free song from songs that um that I don't
want to be unkind, but that I might regard as
sort of like blatantly manipulative or what some people might

(15:23):
call hack songwriting. You know, I don't like to just
like crap all over music, but like, there there are
songs that uh, that I like, but like I acknowledge
that they're very cheesy. You know, they're not necessarily they
don't convey emotional maturity, and yet they still can cause
this intense reaction when I was thinking of is uh.
In fact, there are several songs, probably by Jim Steinman,

(15:45):
that do this for me. Who he hits it seems
like he hits all of the bars. I was thinking
about the song Nowhere Fast from the movie Streets of Fire,
which is intensely cheesy Jim Steinman pop songwriting, but like
on the pre chorus, when you know, the high voices
come in, jumps up an octave and it's really loud,

(16:17):
and I get the shivers, and I I um, I've
definitely experienced the same thing, and that line between cheesy
and emotional and what your body is actually taking in
as opposed to perhaps what your brain thinks differently of it,
Like there's like an intellectual and an emotional place where
it hits you. And sometimes I'm not even sure if

(16:39):
this is true. Um there's a feeling of embarrassment almost
for the performer. And then you think to yourself, are
these chills that I'm feeling part of free san or
are these chills perhaps some sort of like almost like
a cringe thing. And I think it's usually free song.
I don't think it's usual be embarrassment, but they're they're

(17:01):
They're not too good for Jim Steinmann exactly, but I
do think they are like somehow, perhaps like neighbors in
a way. And I think there is something about emotional
poll compared with intellectual poll, and them working in tandem
can create this emotion becauseuse at the end of the day,

(17:21):
a lot of music is just math. It's a lot
of patterns, it's a lot of um time signatures, it's
a lot of you know, hitting things at the correct time.
And so in addition to that, there's that's the intellectual side,
and then there's the performance aspect, which brings an emotional side,
and that can I I am going down a rabbit

(17:43):
hole here. But I think you understand what I'm saying.
Oh yeah, yeah, totally. UM. One last example for people
to think about, maybe before we move on to UH,
to dissecting the concept a little bit more is UH.
This is one example I came across by way of
a researcher named Matt Sacks. I was watching an interview
with him that I found on the internet and UH
and he mentioned that in demonstrating musical free song in

(18:07):
his lectures, he used an isolated track of the background
vocals from the song Gimme Shelter by the Rolling Stones.
And those background vocals are sung by a singer named
Mary Clayton. And when you when you when I hear
them in the song, I mean, I love Gimme Shelter.
It's classic rock song and it's great. But the song
itself does not give me chills. However, the isolated background

(18:31):
vocals by Mary Clayton absolutely give me chills, it all
up and down the body. Uh. And and I think
that's interesting too, that you could actually heighten the effect
in some cases by removing other elements and isolating just
one part of a song. Uh. And Sax has actually
said in this interview, I was watching that. Um, something
like nine percent of people say that this one example

(18:53):
gives them chills. It seems to be like a sort
of home run example to use. Let's try it on
our audience for a seconds now. We're gonna give you
the caveat here that because of legal fair use stuff,
I can only play about ten seconds for you, so
you may not feel it in this moment, but perhaps
if you look this up on your own and listen
to the full thing. However, I gotta say, um, when

(19:15):
I listened to this track for the first time, UM,
with this isolated Mary Clayton thing, it kicked in for
me pretty quickly. So here, let's play a little bit
of that track right now. So that's the Mary Clayton

(19:38):
isolated vocal there and powerful. Yeah, absolutely is um. There's
a lot of ways that people have described this feeling, like, like,
what are a few of them? Oh? Yeah, So there
are different terms people of use. Some people call it
aesthetic chills. Some people say musical chills. Because obviously part

(19:58):
of the sensation is similar aler to feeling cold, they're
also somewhat different. There's a a tingling or shivering sensation
that runs up different parts of the body. Different uh
studies have looked at feeling this in different parts of
the body, but it seems to sometimes happen in the limbs,
like in the arms or legs, or up and down
the spine. Of course, there is the term free so

(20:19):
on which we've been using today, and that's from the
French word meaning shiver. Uh. Some people have used the
term uh skin orgasm, which that seems uh in some
ways kind of kind of phenomenologically accurate with some of
the sensations, but it also brings in a lot of
baggage that's not that's perhaps confusing. Yeah, and in particular, um,

(20:43):
because I've also come across that term before, and I
get it in like a almost like a cute ce
description kind of way. However, at least in my understanding,
there's nothing really sexual associated with this phenomenon whatsoever. So
it does just kind of like add another element that
doesn't actually exist, at least to my understanding. Yeah, it

(21:05):
brings in baggage that is not necessary to understand the concept,
and so it's probably better not to do that one
if you're trying to ask what is this thing and
how can we explain it? Right. And then there's one
other thing we should probably mention, just by way of
saying that we're not really going to get into this today,
which is the the concept of a s MR. People
have asked us to talk about this on the show before.
I guess we've never really gone into it in depth.

(21:26):
It seems like this may have some kind of overlap
with what we're talking about today, or at least share
some boundaries, but we're just gonna bracket that as as
a concept that maybe in some ways related, but it's
different from what we're talking about. Rights Anecdotally, I can
say for myself, I experience freesan often and strongly, but
I don't believe I've ever experienced a s MR. So

(21:49):
I I can't explain that. But you, I completely agree
with you. It's it's it's uh, could be related, but
definitely bracketed and separate. Yeah, So, for the rest of
this episode, we're gonna be focusing on this feeling of
free so on the subject of the psychophysiological response to music,
and we're gonna be asking this question of why do
certain songs, specifically certain moments in songs elicit such a

(22:10):
strong reaction in the body what does it have to
do with pleasure and pain and the obscure functioning of
the reward pathways in our brains? Who gets it? What
causes it? And why is it pleasurable? Uh? And so yeah,
I'm really glad you brought the subject up, Seth, because
I think it's a fascinating puzzle, one that we probably
can't conclusively answer, but we can raise findings that that

(22:32):
point us off in a lot of interesting directions. I
think maybe the listeners will have a lot of fun
trying to see if they can put this puzzle together
themselves as well. And I think with those puzzle pieces,
it does make the experience of experiencing freezon a bit
more fun when you can perhaps recognize those patterns and
the music you're listening to and go, oh, perhaps that's

(22:53):
the reason why I'm feeling this right now, and get
kind of a repeatable experiment where you can go, oh,
I've no is that X, Y or Z are what
cause it? In my own sensations? And then it is.
But it's a little self experimentational and it's honestly, I
find it kind of fun. Yeah. Oh oh, It's one
of the most dangerous and thrilling of states the state

(23:14):
of being able to partially understand your own mind. Yes, okay,
so looking in the phenomenology of of these music thrills
of of freesan. Unfortunately, this is one of those areas
where there is a bunch of existing research at this point,
but a lot of it is focused on related but

(23:34):
slightly different questions, which is just always a mess to
wade through. So there be there are different studies out
there that sort of use different terminology to describe the feelings. Clearly,
these feelings overlap a lot. Sometimes they include or isolate
different components of it. Uh. Some call it chills, some
call it thrills. Some consider goose bumps a necessary part

(23:57):
of freesan. Some don't only look at goose bumps and
not these other sensations. So, unfortunately, when we're talking about
the research going forward, you're just going to have to
accept and keep in mind that what we're talking about
here is not a unified phenomenon with a consistent definition
across all these studies, but sort of a system of
related phenomena with family resemblances that have been approached from

(24:21):
a bunch of different angles. But it's clear that they're
all at least somewhat related. They're all part of this
intense psycho physiological response to music. So what are the
actual descriptive characteristics of the Freezon response. Well, I was
watching a twenty nineteen conference presentation by a researcher working
in the neuroscience of music. I'm going to refer to
several times throughout this episode. Her name is Psyche Louis,

(24:43):
and she lays out some of the most common responses,
breaking down responses to music into categories of the sort
of abstract versus the visceral or somatic. Now, in the
abstract responses to music, you've got general strong emotions, you've
got the idea of feeling trans ported to another place
or time. You've got the feeling of all. You've got

(25:04):
losing your sense of time or where you are, or
the avocation of memories. But then on the other hand,
you've got these visceral and somatic responses to music. And
these are the responses in the body, the ones we're
focused on today, which are chills, goose bumps, lump in
the throat, heart racing, crying, uh, feeling in the pit

(25:25):
of the stomach, and generally the sort of pleasurable appraisal
of these sensations in the body. Seth, what do you
think about that list of sensations in the body? Does
that ring true to you? Yeah? And um, since uh,
looking into this more recently, I've actually been paying more
attention to what I personally experience. And I did not

(25:48):
realize that goose bumps were such a part of my
own personal frees on experience. But while listening to so
many frees on inducing tracks over the past few days
and then actually like looking at my body and being like, oh,
there they are, you know, there are my goose bumps,
and um, so yeah, I know. I I fully believe
that to be true. And UM, here's another thing that

(26:10):
I believe is going to get a bit anecdotal when
it comes to who gets free song from music. And
I apologize for how many times I'm gonna say anecdotal,
but this is a very anecdotal kind of phenomenon. It's
it's difficult to really hammer it down. And um, depending
upon the source. I've looked at a few A lot
of people say about two thirds of people experience free song,

(26:33):
but I've seen it as low as fifty five and
as high as eighties six, So that's a pretty broad
spectrum for how many people they believe to experience this
as to the reports of the inconsistency and uh in
the reported prevalence of free song. You go out and
survey people say, you know, hey, how many of you, um,
on average have these chills and goose bumps and all
these things when you listen to music, You're gonna get

(26:55):
different answers, probably because the question is being asked in
a different way a or with different criteria. So this
is one of the problems with the phenomenon not being
consistently defined or measured. And plus, self diagnosis is always
a pretty tricky thing in general too, with something so
kind of ephemeral, And perhaps that is why some studies

(27:15):
focused on physical reactions like goose bumps. It's like, you
can't lie if I see your goose bumps, there they
are there, they aren't. But I think it's clear that
like more than half of people have frees on. Yeah, yeah,
that that seems to be the case for sure. And UM,
I can say this so um again. For the podcast

(27:35):
that I host, Record Store Society, we have a discord channel. Um.
If people don't know what Discord is it's more or
less a message board that that people you know go,
and it's exclusively for people who listen to this podcast
that I host, and so therefore everyone on there is
a big old music nerd, Like that's just kind of
like you wouldn't go there if you weren't. So the
other day, for Zon got brought up because I actually

(27:58):
heard this new song um that I really enjoyed called
Paranoia Party by Francis Forever, and when I heard it,
I absolutely got tons of for song from it, like, um,
there's a real nice build, there's a big change from
like quiet to loud. There's a lot of patterns kind
of breaking down and then re emerging, a lot of
these things that perhaps influenced frees On and um, so

(28:32):
I posted it on the Discord channel for Record Store Society, going,
oh man, I get big time frees On for this,
and a couple of people were like, I had to
google that word, but now that I know what you're
talking about, me too, And then someone else go like, oh,
me too, and someone else would say like, me too,
and I have to say that this is again, here's
that word. Anecdotal, entirely anecdotal, but like one of the

(28:54):
people on this message board for extreme music nerds, everybody
was feeling. It's like there there wasn't anybody who did
not know what the feeling and sensation of freesan was.
So it says something about attention and it's that chicken
or egg thing again. I believe also at least one
study I was looking at found that people tend to

(29:15):
find familiar music more likely to cause freesan. Yeah, I
I can. I can definitely see that. In particular with
that song I was just talking about the first time
I heard it, certain things would make a hit for me.
For example, a sudden change in volume, because that's something
that is going to hit me no matter why. I
don't need any prior knowledge. Just volume is volume. But

(29:38):
then the second time I listened to that same song,
the anticipation that I knew that the volume change was coming,
that hit me in a different way too, and I
felt it from the anticipation as well. So yeah, yeah,
I percent believe that as well, that that the a
familiar song can cause it for reasons other than just
purely um, what's there. It's not just about anticipatory chills, yes,

(30:04):
chill chills and feelings of freesan leading up to the
moment of sort of the peak that you're you're anticipating, right, yes,
roller coaster, yes, yeah, But I feel like what we
were just saying would sort of go along with it
with the study that I was looking at, Seth, I
think I actually dug this up because you you found
an article, a popular level article by one of the

(30:26):
authors of this study. So this was by Mitchell C.
Culver and Amani L. Lay published in the journal Psychology
of Music in two sixteen called Getting Aesthetic Chills from
Music the Connection between Openness to experience and freesan. So
this is another entry in the the who gets freesan
from music? Question? So this study compared people's reports of

(30:50):
their feelings of freesan and music with physiological responses like
measuring things like skin conductance responses, and a personality typeogy
test that was based on the five factor model. Now,
if you're not familiar that the five factor model is
a way of sort of classifying people's personalities according to
five different metrics, so you know, you can sort of

(31:13):
get an idea of many things about a person and
what kinds of preferences they might have what kinds of
behaviors they might show if you know their scores on
five different measures, and these measures would be conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, extroversion,
and openness. So listeners who experienced free songs tended on

(31:35):
average to be higher in the trait openness. It's also
known as openness to experience. I was looking for a good,
uh succinct definition of openness to experience. This one comes
from the Encyclopedia of Applied Psychology by McRae in two
thousand four, and it identifies that the relevant traits of
openness to experience our tolerance of ambiguity, low dogmatism, need

(31:59):
for variety, esthetic sensitivity, absorption, unconventionality, intellectual curiosity, and intuition.
So people who are high in the trade openness tend
to be more interested in and tend to prefer difference, variety,
and novelty, whereas people who are lower in trade openness

(32:20):
tend to prefer what's familiar and traditional. Wow, it's interesting.
So in a write up feature about this research, one
of the authors, Mitchell C. Culver, wrote, quote, while previous
research had connected openness to experience with free san most
researchers had concluded that listeners were experiencing Freesan as a
result of a deeply emotional reaction they were having to

(32:43):
the music. So right, the idea would have been, maybe
people who are higher and openness to experience are just
more likely to have deep emotional connections with music. But
uh Culver goes on to say, in contrast, the results
of our studies show that it's the cognitive components of
openness to experience, such as making mental predictions about how

(33:03):
the music is going to unfold, or engaging in musical imagery,
which is a way of processing music that combines listening
with daydreaming, that are associated with frees on to a
greater degree than the emotional components. In a whole bunch
of kind of conflicting information that we are receiving and

(33:23):
kind of like experiencing with this whole thing. That's one
of the biggest ones to me is that like the
emotional experience of openness based on the cognitive components of openness,
you know what I mean? Like that that that's that's
that's a head scratcher, that's that's it makes sense to
me in a way. But again, we're talking about the

(33:45):
emotion plus the intellect in a very strange way. Yeah,
exactly so, So it's possible that their their findings are incorrect.
But if Culver and Ela Lately are correct, what they're
saying is that people who are high in the trade
openness are apps not getting more Fressan experiences because they're
more emotional, but because they tend to engage in more

(34:07):
pattern recognition and prediction behavior when listening to music, that
they're more likely to be engaging with the piece of
music in a way that seeks out patterns in the
structure of the song and tries to predict what's coming next,
and that that activity is more highly associated with these
extremely powerful psychophysiological experiences, more so than the than the

(34:30):
emotional components. And I think that's interesting for sure. Yeah,
and and and at least in my own experience, I
can definitely feel that to be true. If I look
at the songs that give me Fressan patterns and then
a subversion of a pattern or a almost like doubling
down on a pattern, like like either way can really
do it. But but but really am some sort of

(34:53):
accent upon a pattern whichever path you want to take
on that this will come back. A major theme in
the research about the underlying mechanisms of frees on has
to do with patterns and prediction and UH and anticipation.
But anyway to move on to other things. So that
that was that people who are higher in the trade
openness tend to report more freesans UH. There is another

(35:15):
There is apparently a social component. I was reading a
note that a researcher named Alf Gabrielson in two thousand twelve,
in a work called Strong Experiences with Music, reported that
people who listen to music together with a friend or
partner experience more activation of the autonomic nervous system, which
is associated with these these reactions in the body. The
autonomic nervous system is UH is the part of the

(35:39):
nervous system that controls things that are that are involuntary
in your body, such as maintaining of course, you know,
heart rate and digestion and breathing and all that, but
also homeostatic responses, responses to changes in temperature, and the
fight or flight response, which is specifically a subset of
the autonomic nervous system known as the sympathetic nervous system

(36:00):
and the sympathetic nervous system appears to often be activated
in these frees on experiences. So something's going on in
the body where a a musical freesan has something in
common with the fight or flight response, which is very
interesting and we'll get more into that later on than now.

(36:25):
Another way to approach this question of who gets musical
frees on um is can we learn anything by identifying
what people have in common when they don't experience musical
freeson uh. So, again I mentioned earlier that presentation I
was watching by the researcher Psyche Louis Uh and she
was talking about studies that have been done with people

(36:47):
who have what's called musical and hedonia, and this is
a condition where people just do not really derive pleasure
from music. Now, it's important to specify what musical and
hedonia is not. It's different on what's known as a
musa or tone deafness. People with musical and hedonia do
not show major errors in their perception of music. They

(37:08):
can hear it just fine. And it's different from general
and hedonia. So people with musical and hedonia can derive
pleasure from other things. It's not a generalized lack of pleasure.
It's just a lack of pleasure from music. And one
thing Louis talks about is research that has found that
people with musical and hadonia have different patterns of connectivity

(37:29):
between the auditory regions of the brain and a region
of the brain known as the nucleus incumbents. Uh So,
the nucleus incumbents is important in the reward system. It
is used to drive motivation for the anticipation of rewards,
including things like food, sex, money, and drugs. Basically, like

(37:50):
anything you can think of that would be, you know,
a kind of pleasurable stimulus that would really motivate you
to want to get more of it. That motivation to
get more of it is mediated by reward system in
the brain, including the nucleus accumbans. This might be also
very unscientific for me to say, but all those things
also seemed to have um elements of um anticipation and dopamine.

(38:12):
Oh yes, exactly. So the thrill you get in anticipation
of one of these things, food, sex, money, drugs, any
of these these things, the thrill you get in the
brain while you were in pursuit of that goal is
very much related. That is the reward system working to
motivate your behavior. Now, another interesting thing about who gets
musical freesans. I was reading a about a study by

(38:35):
the Estonian neuroscientist Yak punk Step who found in research
in nineteen in the journal Music Perception that at least
in his study, that women reported experiencing chills from music
somewhat more more often than men did. Though obviously people
of all genders get the chills, it found that it
was a little bit more common in women. And also

(38:57):
there was an interesting observation from punks up study, which
was this quote, many mistakenly believe that happiness in music
is more influential in evoking the response than sadness. A
series of correlational studies analyzing the subjective experience of chills
in groups of students listening to a variety of musical
pieces indicated that chills are related to the perceived emotional

(39:21):
content of various selections, with much stronger relations to perceived
sadness than happiness. So, according to poccepts research here, sad
music is more likely to cause free songs in reality,
But when people are just sort of asked to speculate,
they tend to believe that happy music causes it more.

(39:42):
Isn't that fascinating? And it makes me wonder like, could
this be related to confusion in reflecting on your own
experiences of free song, because maybe even though it actually
happens to you more often with negative valenced esthetic content,
you know, sad music, sad movies, the experience itself is
somehow pleasurable, so maybe you mistakenly believe it to be

(40:06):
caused by more positive valenced content in your memory. At
least I don't know that that's the causal chain there,
but that that mistake that people make is interesting. Yeah,
it definitely could be some sort of confirmation bias, um,
because even now when you said that, I thought to myself, Okay,
what are all the examples I'm thinking of? They are
one happy songs? I I I, And I think part

(40:29):
of it, at least for me, is there's perhaps something
triumphant in a lot of the songs that creates the
freesng feeling in me. Um, maybe a bit bombastic. I'm
not going to apologize that I get tons of free
song from limb aserab, but you know, when when when
do you hear the people sing? Comes on? I? I
get that feeling all over And there is something that

(40:51):
is triumphant about that song, but there's a there, there's
a subtlety to it. There, there's an ambiguity to it
because the song and its lyrical content and even something
about the way it sounds implies a kind of risk
or threat. Does that make sense? It does? And and
and perhaps that kind of duality is just part of
music in general. Like I was thinking about that Beatles song. Um,

(41:13):
it's like, I've got to believe it's getting better, It's
getting better all the time. And then you hear John
Letton say it couldn't get much worse. Were like, it
seems like a very positive song unless you pay attention,
and it's like, oh no, no, this is a very
sad song that is hopeful. Perhaps and and perhaps that
that that dichotomy, it's just a part of music in general,

(41:33):
which which needs to be factored in as well. Huh
so do you yes for me? Do you hear the
people sing? It is sort of triumphant sounding, but in
its lyrical content it is a demonstration of courage in
the face of near certain death. Right Wow, yeah, fascinating
fascinating stuff anyway, So ready to move on to maybe
the next question, which is what triggers free song and music, like,

(41:56):
what are the specific auditory triggers that bring it about
most often? Again, this is something where there's probably going
to be a lot of idiosyncrasy in people's responses, but
there are certain things that do tend to emerge as
as like the most common triggers. And here I'm going
to be referring to I can't remember if I already
said the name of this paper. I think I didn't,

(42:16):
But this is a paper that is a a review
of the of the existing research on frees on as
often by Luke Harrison and Psyche Louis who already mentioned.
And it's called Thrills, Chills, freesans and Skin Orgasms Towards
an Integrative Model of Transcendence Psychophysiological Experiences in Music. And

(42:37):
this is published in Frontiers in Psychology, and they collect
some of the existing research on musical freesan inducers. One
big study that looked into this was slow Boda in
and this one found that the common types of musical
phrases that bring people to a state of freesan, we're

(42:57):
quote chord progressions descending the circle of fifths, to the
tonic very specific. Uh. Then melodic appoggiaturas. So appoggiaturas are
when there is a grace note or grace notes added
to a melody before or between the expected notes. I
feel like it's kind of hard to explain without singing it.

(43:18):
I kind of don't want to sing it because that
would sound pathetic, But I know what you mean. It's
that quick anticipatory note right before the actual kickoff of
the chorus or the verse or the bridge or whatever. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
So if you can imagine a familiar melody, say, imagine
somebody singing the melody of of London Bridge is falling down,
but adding in little grace notes in between the familiar

(43:41):
notes of the melody. Does that make sense? It does
to me, but does it make sense to our listener?
But then also the onset of unexpected harmonies, This is
a huge one for me. A lot of the ones
that I can think of are when or when harmonies
come in, when vocal when new vocals are added. Rights,
yeah uh. And then they also say and melodic or

(44:03):
harmonic sequences, which seems very unspecific to me. Is I'm
not sure what to make of that, But they also
cite another study by Grua at all or Greva at
all in two thousand seven that found um that the
onsets of freeson were quote most likely to occur during
peaks in loudness, moments of modulation, and works in which

(44:24):
the melody occupied the human vocal register. Uh. And all
that sounds right to me. A big thing is changes
in volume, dynamic changes, sudden dynamic leaps where you go
from UH, where you go from soft to suddenly loud,
or from loud to suddenly soft. Those have been shown
to elicit freesan UM. But then also sudden changes in

(44:47):
say the register when you jump up an octave or
something like that. And they point out that these uh,
these triggers tend to point in the direction of freesan
having something to do with expectance violation. Because almost all
of the things that have been identified as major triggers
of free so on are when a song has established

(45:07):
a pattern and then the pattern suddenly changes in some way.
That all makes sense. Now, I guess it's time to
move on to the question of why does this happen?
This is really the big puzzle, right, So you've got
something that's just a song it is, you know, music,
It is vibrating air molecules that are stimulating your ears.
It's sound that occurs in a certain pattern or or

(45:30):
or cycle of tones and rhythmic pulses, and somehow that
means something to you. And it not only means something
to you, it triggers this powerful response that seems to
involve uh, the emotions and and pleasure seeking and and
the full body and and maybe something having to do
with the autonomic nervous system kind of like a fight

(45:52):
or flight response would. So it's this big mess that's
obviously really complicated. So one of the things that I
thought might be helpful to start by looking at is
one specific subset of musical free so on, which is
the experience of goose bumps. So it's actually, I think,
at root, a fascinating question in itself. Why would human
beings get goose bumps from esthetic reactions to art and music?

(46:17):
You know, there's a biological response that it's at least
at first glance, hard to identify a cause and effect
relationship for right, Yeah, it doesn't make much sense intellectually. Yeah, Uh,
so when you get goose bumps, the technical term for
what's happening here is pilo erection. It's also sometimes known
as the pilo motor reflex um. And what's going on

(46:38):
in your body when you get goose bumps is that
in your skin, at the base of your body hairs,
there are these little muscles known as erector pilly and
when these muscles contract, it causes your hairs, which are
normally relaxed and lying flat, to suddenly stand on end.
It's sort of like pulls them down tight and they
stand straight up. And the question would be why does

(47:00):
the body do this? Well, there are a couple of
major explanations that are correlated with what normally causes goose
bumps or similar reactions in animals, especially animals with more
hair than us. One answer is the cold. When you
are cold, your body is losing heat through the skin,
and the pilo erection response is an evolutionary adaptation that

(47:23):
helps protect the body against heat loss by insulating the skin,
so your body detects a chill and it protects itself
by contracting the erector pilly, causing the body hair to
stand up. This obviously would have been much more useful
to human ancestors, who had significantly more body hair than
we do. It does a lot less to help insulate

(47:43):
our relatively unhaired bodies today, but it seems to be
a somewhat vestigial trait, like when we get cold, we
still get the goose bumps, as if we had a
big coat of fur to help insulate us when when
our skin did that. But it's not just when we
get cold. There are also threats of danger. That cause
is the polo motor response, So the body deploys the

(48:03):
same reflex, the same pilo erection in response to sudden
shocks or fear or threats of danger, and the evolutionary
reasoning is that this provides a survival advantage because pilo
erection makes the body look bigger. So you've probably seen
a cat that gets spooked by some kind of possible threat,
maybe an aggressive dog, or maybe just a cucumber on

(48:24):
the floor. Whatever, it seems to detect the possibility that
some other kind of animal is they're threatening it, and
it's first stands up on end. Now the cat looks thicker, larger,
it looks more dangerous and able to defend itself, which
means that this other animal or or pseudo animal is
less likely to attack and these explanations for the pilo

(48:47):
motor reflex have been known about for a long time. Actually.
Charles Darwin wrote about these reactions and goose bumps in
his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and
Animals in eighteen seventy two, where he wrote that quote
hardly any appressive movement is so general as the involuntary
erection of the hair's feathers and other dermal appendages. And
he noted correlates of these in in not just mammals,

(49:09):
but in mammals and in birds and in reptiles, which
I thought was interesting. So the evolutionary reasoning connecting goose
bumps to a survival advantage in the in the case
of cold or threats makes very solid sense. But why
would this connect to abstract emotions or to esthetics like music?
So I was looking around for good explanations of this.

(49:30):
One thing I came across was an explainer I found
in Scientific American from two thousand three by a physiologist
and professor of zoology at the University of Gulf in
Ontario named George A. Boubinick, who said that basically all
goose bumps responses involve the release of adrenaline and the
activation of the autonomic nervous system like we were talking

(49:51):
about earlier, and uh Bubinic writes quote. Adrenaline, which in
humans is produced in two small bean like glands that
sit sit a the kidneys, not only causes the contraction
of skin muscles, but also influences many other body reactions.
In humans, adrenaline is often released when we feel cold
or afraid, but also if you're under stress and feel

(50:12):
strong emotions such as anger or excitement. Other signs of
adrenaline release include tears, sweaty palms, trembling hands, and increase
in blood pressure, erasing heart, or the feeling of butterflies
in the stomach. Uh So, that's a little frustrating because
it establishes the possible mechanism in the endocrin or nervous
system that may be partially correct for explaining the mechanism

(50:35):
in these cases. But you're still kind of left wondering why,
right rights And also, well, it's been brought up before
this connection to fight or flight, but the why has
not been explained at all. Uh So, I'll try another
one here. So this one, I'm not sure how good
of an explanation this is, but at least I found

(50:57):
it very interesting. So this is what's known as the
separation call hypothesis. This is another evolutionary explanation for emotional chills.
And this one goes back to somebody I mentioned earlier
in the episode, the Estonian neuroscientist Yak punk Sepp, who
he's known for creating the note the term affective neuroscience,

(51:17):
the neuroscience of emotions, and uh punk steps hypothesis. I
found a good summary of it in another paper that
was by Benetic and Karen Back in Biological Psychology in
two thousand eleven, so I'm going to read their summary
of of punk SEPs view. He argues that the separation
calls of lost young animals used to inform parents about

(51:39):
the whereabouts of their offspring. These calls might have induced
internal feelings of coldness and chills, which enhanced the motivation
for social reunion. A preserved responsivity to certain acoustical features
e g. Sustained high frequency notes as often presented by
solo performers, may represent an unconditional component of the chill response.

(52:02):
This theoretical approach, which could be termed separation call hypothesis,
thus relates pylo erection to sensations of coldness and sadness.
Uh So, this is interesting. I'm kind of skeptical that
this explains everything that's going on, but it does touch
on multiple features in a way that would make some
kind of causal sense in an evolutionary perspective. So the

(52:25):
idea is that, okay, you separate baby rats from their mothers,
and the baby rats get cold and they squeak at
a particular frequency that triggers the parent rat to locate
them quickly, So the process would go. The baby is alone,
feels temperature decrease, the baby releases a separation call. This
causes a feeling of separation, a feeling of loss or

(52:48):
a kind of correlate of sadness in the human context,
and a feeling of physical coldness, chills, or even goose
bumps in the mother, motivating rapid reunion and contact with
the baby rat. So punk Step was arguing that maybe
these emotional goose bumps we feel in response to music
have a deep biological root in this mammalian separation call

(53:11):
and and the response that we would feel in in
in reaction to hearing it. Perhaps some sort of like
evolutionary left over kind of a thing. Right, So you
have certain types of sounds or thought patterns triggering this
feeling of being moved, which which would simultaneously cause a
feeling of almost like physical coldness, the chilling feeling goose bumps,

(53:33):
and a feeling of separation, and a motivation to re
establish social contact, which in itself would be a a
sort of a reward motivation where you've got a goal
now and you're like, I need to get this. I mean, um,
if true, that's absolutely amazing everything that could come from
a simple like evolutionary left over instinct. You know, I

(53:56):
think about the entire music industry coming from just this
left over a response that has kind of like almost
um almost pointed usn't the wrong direction, but we got
so much pleasure out of it anyway. Yeah, And I
think this may have something to it, and I've read
that there were some subsequent studies that kind of lent
support to at least in some cases. But it also

(54:16):
seems hard for me to imagine that this is the
direct route of all emotional chills. Uh. I mean, maybe
maybe this kind of causation is wrapped up in there somewhere,
but I'm still thinking about other ideas. So one of
the other ideas comes back to something that we we've
mentioned a few times now, which is about patterns and predictions. Now,

(54:38):
earlier I mentioned this conference presentation I watched by Psyche Louis,
the musical neuroscience researcher. It was at the Brain Mind
Summit and in might t in twenty nineteen and uh
and she talks about this hypothesis and in her presentation,
so she says that a lot of our response to
music has to do with fulfillments and violations of expectation.

(55:00):
So you think about what's your what's your actual experience
of listening to music, What is your brain doing when
you're paying attention to the music you're listening to. I
think it's that music establishes patterns. You know, phrases are repeated,
chord progressions, cycle, and often symmetrical ways. Popular music, of course,
has the very common verse chorus verse structure. Uh. And

(55:24):
though there are other types of music, like jazz and
classical music that are less repetitious and have less to
do with established patterns, they still do establish some patterns.
You can feel out the grammar of a classical symphony
or or a jazz improvisation, even though they might be
less repetitive than some familiar types of pop and rock music, right,

(55:45):
Like maybe there's just a theme that repeats, or perhaps
it just being played in the same key. You go, Oh,
I can kind of predict where this is going to
go based simply on like instinctual knowledge of like you know,
different chord progressions and different different um scales, that kind
of thing. So, yeah, a piece of music has a
kind of implied grammar or syntax as kind of rules

(56:07):
that you can learn, and then you use that to
predict how it's going to develop from the present moment.
And so she talks about how this feeling of being
able to predict what's coming next usually is something that
we find rewarding in the brain, like in the actual
reward system. Uh, the ability to say, hey, I think
I know what's going to happen next, and then anticipating

(56:29):
and then trying to see if your prediction is correct.
That is a reward motivation process in that part of
the brain. And this actually comes back to something I
think we already mentioned a little bit earlier in the episode,
but the research finding um that people who get chills
from music versus people who don't get chills from music.
There are differences in the amount of fiber connecting different

(56:53):
parts of the brain. In this case, it's the amount
of white matter connecting regions of the auditory system where
you would be processed incoming sounds um in the temporal lobe,
two regions of the frontal lobe that Luis says are
important for emotion and reward again, specifically the nucleus incumbents
and the medial prefrontal cortex. And so this comes back

(57:15):
to the dopaminergic reward system. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that
I think is sometimes a bit mischaracterized as being synonymous
with the feeling of pleasure, which is slightly off because
the dopaminergic reward system is not just responsible for feeling
good after getting what you want, but for managing the
salience of incentives, managing your awareness of things in your

(57:37):
environment that you might want, and your motivation to get them. So,
dopamine increases in the brain in anticipation of receiving a reward,
and it plays a role in motivating you to repeat
a behavior that caused you to get a reward in
the past. So in our ancestral environment. These rewards would
be things that provided a survival reproduction advantage, so food, water,

(58:00):
sexual partners, but also things like parental care. But our
reward systems can also become motivated by rewards that are
at a sort of abstract remove, like money, or perhaps
things like enjoyable art and music, or even by substances
that stimulate the reward pathways chemically, like opiates or cocaine.
But from some of the neuroscience research, it looks like

(58:23):
when we have these intensely pleasurable psycho physiological responses to music,
something is going on with the reward pathway that has
to do with predictions that pleasure in music somehow has
something to do with the listener recognizing patterns and the
reward seeking mechanisms in the brain being motivated to detect
and predict those patterns. This makes me want to speculate,

(58:47):
but I will not. I don't know, go right ahead.
My My speculation is this, UM, I remember basically reaching
a certain age where um, you think to yourself, uh, gosh,
I hate school, schools annoying? Gosh, school what what a drag?
And then someone wiser will tell you, you know, school
isn't actually about the lessons. It's not about the homework.

(59:11):
School is about learning how to learn. It's about learning
how it to be intellectually curious enough that in the future,
when you do want to know something, you can teach
yourself how to know it because you've learned how to learn.
And in my mind, I'm thinking about how music is
kind of instilling this desire for pattern recognition, which personally

(59:34):
I do think benefits life, and I do think benefits
um oh, problem solving and benefits you know, making a
grocery list, everything, You know what I mean, Like, patterns
are extremely useful in our society. So it's it's um
perhaps it is an evolutionary leftover that makes us enjoy music,
but perhaps it has stayed with us because it has

(59:57):
proven to be useful in the regard of like it's
teaching us, it's improving us, it's making our brains a
little a little more fits because it's almost like we're
having a little training session by listening to music, by
enjoying arts, by enjoying culture, and that makes everything else
in our lives a little bit better and a little
bit easier. So, like music is teaching us how to

(01:00:18):
learn in a way pure speculation. Well, I definitely think
there could be something to that, But I would also
come back at it from the other angle, because it's
clearly not as simple as music sets up a pattern
that you can predict, and then when you correctly predict
the pattern, it's pleasurable because if if music is too predictable,

(01:00:43):
it becomes boring. Right, And this goes sort of it,
at least on the face of it, seemed to go
against something we were talking about earlier, which is that
a lot of these peak experiences free sun come precisely
when patterns are broken or violated. It's not when it's
the most predictable and you're the easiest to get the
pattern recognition right. It's when something changes unexpectedly that you

(01:01:07):
feel the tingles all over. But at least for me,
that's the learning aspect of it. Um to to throw
something in that, perhaps Robert would say, if Robert were here, Um,
there's a thing with meditation where, um, you know, if
you're trying to clear your mind and you're trying not
to think about anything and then you accidentally think about
a slice of strawberry cheesecake, you know that's bad. In

(01:01:29):
the regard that you're trying to think of nothing. However,
the active energy you take during most kinds of meditation
to clear your mind again, to go okay, get out
of my mind, strawberry cheesecake. I'm trying to think about nothing.
That is akin to like doing a rep. It's like
a kin to like doing something active to make you better.

(01:01:50):
So perhaps the subversion of patterns that we recognize our
brain does hit the little food pellet switch and go,
good job, you noticed, you know, aren't you a smart
little person? Keep up, keep it up. You know you're
learning here, You're you're you're being um, You're being someone
trained to understand patterns when they change, and perhaps to

(01:02:14):
pay extra attention to when they do change, because that's
perhaps when life is at its most dangerous, is when
the when the patterns are subverted, not when the patterns
are the same. Well, that actually ties into something else
I came across. So I mentioned earlier that I watched
that video that was an interview with a music neuroscientists
named Matt Sachs, and uh Sachs had speculated, now this

(01:02:35):
is actually going more back back in a previous uh
possible explanation that we were talking about for the neurobiological
mechanisms of pleasure and freees on. But when when you
go to the idea of the arousal of the autonomic
nervous system, you know, the fight or flight response, uh,
and getting goose bumps as a result of a of
cold or being under threat. Sax is talking about the

(01:02:58):
pleasurable response to music in those terms. Maybe getting goose
bumps is like a threat, and he speculates, I'm not
sure how much research there is to back this up,
but he speculates and maybe sometimes high pitched notes or
sudden dynamic changes in music are actually initially reacted to
by the body as a kind of threat. And it's

(01:03:18):
it's like, you know, when you detect a loud sound,
what does that usually mean? It usually means like there's
something you need to pay attention to because it's possibly dangerous.
But then he speculates that after the startling sounds such
as the dynamic change in the music or the sudden
high voice or something is rationalized by the prefrontal cortex
and judged actually safe, that's when the sense of pleasure comes.

(01:03:41):
It's in the realization that your your brain has sort
of been startled into a semi fight or flight response
by something in the sound, But actually it's just a
piece of music, And it's like realizing that the threat
in a horror movie is not actually dangerous. I was
just thinking the same thing, like like a horror movie,
like a roller coaster. It's um a safe exploration of

(01:04:02):
fear and anticipation is definitely a big part of that.
I mean, think about any jump scare in a horror film.
You know, yeah, interesting, thank thank But anyway, to come
back to Harrison and Louis. In their summary of of
a study from two thousand one by Blood and store Uh,

(01:04:23):
they write that these researchers quote showed with pet scanning
of people under musical free san that patterns may reflect
a craving reflex similar to that surrounding responses for food, sex,
and drugs of abuse. It's possible, then, that the reason
we develop such affinity for free san inducing music is
that once we experience musical free san, we develop a

(01:04:46):
dopaminergic anticipation for its return, effectively becoming slightly addicted to
the musical stimulus. I mean, that's an analogy I've made
before when it comes to um seeking out new music
that it is similar to a drug and being a
person who is very much a teetotaler in every way,

(01:05:07):
I do not want to diminish people's actual addictions to
real drugs, but following the same patterns. Uh yeah, I'm
just like, Oh, I I think I can find a
another album, Like I haven't heard a new album that
really got me excited lately. I gotta I gotta go
to go down to the record store. I need to
go find something else. I gotta go dig through some crates.
And it's just sort of like that feeling of there's

(01:05:27):
something out there, there's something out there that's really good,
and you haven't heard it yet, so you need to
go get it. You need to go find it, you
need to talk to people and uh and those are
the things you can do on record store society, find
it wherever you find podcasts. Do do you when you're
seeking out new music? Do you actually have like the
these direct pleasurable experiences in mind is like sort of

(01:05:51):
the thing you're questing after, Because while I do love
them in music, I remember when I was more obsessed
with like finding new music, I had a probably a
stupider idea in my head, which was like, once I
hear this album, then finally I'll understand music. Do you
know what I mean? I do? I definitely do. I

(01:06:11):
I felt that also, UM where, in particular, if there
were albums that everyone said, we're truly, truly great, and
I would go, oh, man, I'm gonna I'm gonna find
this album. Let's say it's The Velvet Underground Nico, you know,
the famous one with the Andy Warhol Binna on the cover.
UM where I'm like, this is that album that everyone
keeps talking about. One day, I'm gonna find it. I'm

(01:06:33):
gonna listen to it, and then I'll know what everyone's
talking about, and I will have achieved something. It will
be like a totem somehow that I have found and
listened to this album. Obviously, this is way before any
kind of streaming media, so it was much more difficult
to track down and purchase an album when I was
a kid. Um. But but in that same regard, I
would say, to answer your question about seeking it out

(01:06:56):
and does that provide some sort of pleasure? I do
think that for me personally, the things I love most
in music are um progression change, experimentation, people trying new things.
I really love really experimental, really you know, for lack
of a better word, odd music. I really enjoy that.

(01:07:18):
And not to say that I don't also enjoy you know,
some some beatles as well. But um, but that being
the case, I would not be surprised if deep down,
subconsciously me perpetually seeking stranger music, seeking the experimental and
the you know, the the the new, for lack of

(01:07:39):
a better word, is perhaps trying to find that thrill again,
find that that that roller coaster, find that, um that
that that that that jumps scared from that that scary movie.
You know. Oh well, this is interesting because this connects
to something else I was reading. So I was reading
an interview with a researcher named dr oy In a

(01:08:00):
vessel of z Ki, who studies the science of the
human response to art and aesthetics. That a place called
the Max Plank Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, and he'd done
some work on essentially people's frees on reactions not just
to music, but to other genres of arts, such as poetry,
because also people can get frees on from poetry, and

(01:08:21):
so he did a study on that and one thing
he noted this was in the context of poetry, but
I think it's probably also true of music is that
he found that experienced people need more complexity in order
to be affected. So basically, the more experience you have
with a genre of art, usually the weirder you need
it to be. That makes sense. No I've made this

(01:08:43):
analogy myself where people have asked me, oh, why are
you listening to that noise? Like literally, you know noise.
There's a lot of noise albums that I very much enjoy,
and I'm like, I think about it like a foodie
where there's a person out there who, you know, they
love pasta, and they ate their pasta and it's oh good.
But at a certain point, after they've really really focused

(01:09:03):
and studied and had so much pasta's coming out their ears,
they're like, you know what, I think, like, I need
to go to this like gastro Microbiology center where they
give me like a pasta foam and like a snifter
of basil liquefied that I inject in my arm. Like
like I I do think that all art does eventually

(01:09:24):
become stranger and stranger, and I think that goes for
everything I think that goes for shoes, sneaker heads will
probably do the same thing, same thing with them people
who are really into cars, people who are really into um,
I think everything, honestly, I do think all aesthetic appreciation
eventually gets really strange because you're perhaps getting a little
bored and you're looking for that new feeling again, right?

(01:09:45):
Does that happen with everything? So I wonder about cars,
like if you if you are somebody who's obsessed with cars,
you go to all the auto shows and you read
all the car blogs and all that. Eventually, are you
like only interested in batmobiles and rocket powered cars and stuff,
or like, I don't know, I wonder about that. I
think this will relate again to what we were looking
at um before, with like the different kinds of brains,

(01:10:08):
where there was the one kind of brain. Um that
this was when you were talking about openness, how one
was looking for the novel, looking for the new, and
the other one was looking for the traditional, looking for
the essential, you know. And I really do feel like,
perhaps let's let's take a car example. I think neither
of us are car guys, but we will put ourselves
in that world. There is someone that goes to know,

(01:10:29):
my nineteen sixties Corvette is the perfect car that I
will love forever. And then there's another person at the
same car show who's looking at all the like the
fancy like I don't even know what they're called, but
like the like the prototype cars that will never actually
be made but always look really really neat and futuristic,
and you know, blade Runner esque. Um, they'll only drive

(01:10:51):
one of those spike cars from Fury Road. Yes, And
so I think both exist, and I think both exist
in also at every form of arts, like there are
people who are I only listen to classic rock, and
there are people who are like, no, I need I
need some chainsaws on ice cubes, you know, through reverb
chamber sus so I I it's all there, you know,

(01:11:13):
some people like Thomas Kincaid, some people like Picasso, and
I think it's it's all good. It's all good. And
I think perhaps what you're talking about with the the
differences between openness and just what brain connectivity does for
you personally might might help explain that. And Frizon, yeah,
I think you could be right about that. So I
realized time is running short, but there's one more thing

(01:11:34):
I wanted to hit before we wrap up, because I
think this is interesting as well. Um So I came across,
like I mentioned, this researcher named Oregon Vessel of is Key.
He's got a study I was looking at published in
Social Cognitive and affect of Neuroscience. But I actually found
what was really interesting was an interview with him done
by a poetry journal called The Napkin Poetry Review. And

(01:11:55):
in this interview, this guy was talking about the constant
upt of pleasure in negative emotions, which I think is
something that really does need to be addressed if we're
talking about uh freesan in in music, because it's so
often in in songs that are sad or have some
kind of negative valence. And actually he points out that,
you know, Aristotle wrote about this apparent paradox, like why

(01:12:18):
do people enjoy going to the theater to watch tragic
plays that are full of pity and fear and anguish?
Are these emotions not painful when we experience them in
our lives And the answer is yes, they are. But
there must be something about experiencing them in the context
of a play that transforms these negative emotions into something pleasurable.

(01:12:41):
That we want to seek out and repeat. And as
an analogy, you might think, of course, about that sad
song you can't stop listening to. There's some kind of
pleasure in the aesthetics of sadness. Um. Now, another way
of possibly explaining this is that Aristotle wrote also about
the the complexity of negative emotions them elves, and how
they often contain pleasurable aspects. So, for example, he wrote

(01:13:05):
that anger always has an element of pleasure in it
because the person who's angry is always at some level
sort of experiencing a thrill from from the expectation of
vengeance for you know, the way they've been wronged and uh,
and obviously you know, there's a lot of media that
clearly seems geared towards just making people recreationally angry. Sometimes

(01:13:27):
people want to get angry about stuff. But you could
also say that the same could be true about sadness,
that maybe there is something going on with sadness, that
maybe sadness can be pleasurable in some ways, if it's
just say, due to separation of loss, because there's this
pleasurable anticipation of redemption and reunion, the same way that

(01:13:47):
anger could be pleasurable because there's this anticipation of revenge.
But anyway, for so for for this researcher of Vasalowski,
he said that this ended up making him want to
study that the concept of being moved moved, which is
something that's clearly not just like pleasurable or painful. It
is this intense emotional state that can blend positive and

(01:14:09):
negative emotions into a single episode. It's it's pleasure and
pain indivisible, actually um and that he u. He added
a hypothesis onto this concept of being moved, which has
been explored by by philosophers for centuries, which is that
it seems like peaque moments of being moved, having this ambiguous,
complex emotional episode where you're experiencing both maybe joy and

(01:14:32):
sadness at the same time. Those experiences tend to be
marked by emotional chills or goose bumps. Yet again, and
so he did some research looking into this in people's
responses to poetry and uh and in talking about possible
reasons why people why we might have this reaction, he says,
you know, it could be that it's it's conceptually when

(01:14:53):
something feels important and at stake, you know, when when
it feels like that the autonomic nervous system is aroused
and causes this goose bumps reaction, uh that is presented
to the conscious brain as a sort of signal that's
something that's going on in the art that you're listening.
You know, the music you're listening to or the poem

(01:15:14):
you're reading, something important seems to be up for grabs,
and that you need to be on alert and remember
what's happening. Makes sense. And this comes back to you know,
I can think of a lot of the things that
give me goose bumps in art that are somewhat positive,
but they also, like I was saying earlier with lie Miserab,
they involves some element of like risk or change, maybe

(01:15:37):
displays of courage or new possibilities, which are themselves often
very very kind of scary. So coming back to what
Vassal of Whisky says in this interview, he says, you
have the negative emotion on the foreground and this antidote
in the background, or vice versa. But there's always this clash.
You can't really decide on if it's now positive or negative,

(01:15:57):
So it's somehow both and this creates a lot of tension.
But importantly, we can experience this clash from an aesthetic
distance mode. So it's something about the the ambiguity of
these uh, these you know, stimuli that elicit a combination
of of pleasure and pain, of joy and sadness at
the same time that caused this feeling of being moved.

(01:16:17):
Something about the the high stakes that seem to be
suggested by these by these complex emotional states, maybe stimulate
the autonomic nervous system because it's making your body in
some conceptual sense, feel threatened, as if there was like
a bearer menacing you, and it's trying to get your
attention to do something about this, this concept that's being raised.

(01:16:39):
But then again, as with what we talked about before,
maybe it's possible that you realize you can trigger this
response with some kind of aesthetic stimulus like music or poetry.
And then once you realize you can trigger it, the
reward system in the brain just wants to get it
again and says, well, let's try that again and again,
and and that's what motivates perhaps the play measurable kind

(01:17:00):
of feeling there, it's the grasping after it. Yeah, I
think we've answered some quell I'm not gonna say we've
answered some questions, but like you said, we we've identified
some puzzle pieces, we've laid them out on the table,
and we've taken a good look at them. What seems
most compelling to you now that we've talked about all this.
I do think that Frison seems to me to be

(01:17:24):
an evolutionary leftover that is tied to the fight or
flight response, and that perhaps our brains have misinterpreted it
into something that has made us enjoy art in many ways,
but in particular music, which doesn't make a lot of sense. However,

(01:17:45):
that's what it's it's adding up to in my mind.
And yeah, and this could this is a this is
a deep, deep situation that we've we've kind of dug
ourselves into, and I'm not sure if we'll be able
to get out all right. Well, the next thing is
everybody's gotta go listen to Record Store Society. What's a
what's a good episode for people to start off with?

(01:18:05):
Is something you've done recently? You think people should look up? Well,
if they specifically want to hear you and Robert, they
got to check out let's see. I think that's episode
seventeen and that episode is called Video Dream and that's
the one where we do a deep dive into a
whole bunch of our favorite music videos. Um, let's see
there's a lot of other really good ones. Oh man. Um,

(01:18:29):
there's a really great one called EP or Not EP.
That's episode nineteen where that's there's a music journalist and
author Matt Lamay. He was one of the uh like
the like original like a Pitchfork writers back in the day. Um,
and that's a really fun conversation. We've got a really
great episode coming out this Friday, but I I suppose

(01:18:50):
yeah it's tomorrow. I can, I can stay here tomorrow.
I've got this really great musician named m Sage. He's
one of my favorites. And um, we're discussing music document
trees and that's a very fun deep well so uh
because I'm I'm stage. In addition to being a wonderful musician,
also happens to be a film professor in Chicago at

(01:19:11):
a university. So uh, he he's got a really great
um dual knowledge that really music documentaries are the perfect
subject to have him talk about. So he's a lot
of fun. So anyway, Uh, there's always something fun going
on every episode's good. But but those are a few alright, folks. Well,
if that catches your fancy, you should go check out
Seth's podcast, Record Store Society. Uh. In the meantime, I'll

(01:19:34):
see do we have anything else? Now? I guess that
wraps it up for today. But um, but yeah, if
you want to find any more of your of our podcasts,
we are stuff to blow your mind. You can find
us wherever you get your podcast. We're on all the platforms,
all the stuff like that, or you can just google us.
Of course, Please, as always hit subscribe if you're not
subscribe so you can get all of the episodes we
put out in the future. Big thanks as always to

(01:19:56):
Seth who is our wonderful producer, produces every episode of
this show and does it does such a great job. Seth,
we love you and well I really appreciate you coming
on the show today. Very happy to do it. And
Robert will be back next time. That's right, yes, so
Robert will be back on the show in the next episode.
And in the meantime, if you want to get in
touch with us to give us feedback on this episode
or any other to suggest topic for the future, just

(01:20:18):
to say hello. You can email us at contact at
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