Musical Frisson by Kevin Meyer
“ripple of chills or goose bumps (technically termed piloerection) over one’s body in emotional response to music”
I always thought people felt music the way I do. That being: a certain noisy, dissonant segment of a song makes my skin tingle, through my entire body. It’s a pulse that starts at my ears and travels all the way to my feet. When it’s strong, I get goosebumps. It’s the feeling you get from a roller coaster, or bungee jumping, those high-adrenaline things people do. But I don’t have to leave my bed. I put on my headphones and close my eyes. It’s like sex.
Okay, let’s be realistic: The feeling I get from music does not feel the way sex feels, but it’s not terribly far off, either. Let me put it this way: When I bring a woman back to my place, I like to crank up the tunes before we stick our tongues down each other’s throats.
This feeling I get from certain moments in music, it’s not often an emotional response. It’s about how sounds lie next to each other. A purely mechanical relationship with noise. A sudden start, a stop, a shift in volume or time signature, or the way all of those things layer on top of one another. The same song will have the same effect, no matter how many times I listen to it.
I’m usually alone when I feel it, or alone in a crowd. Live music is one of my favorite ways to spend my time and money. The feeling is strongest through headphones. Don’t even get me started on 5.1 surround-sound versions of albums, like The Downward Spiral.
I had no idea there was a name for this feeling. No idea the feeling was unusual. No idea it had been studied. I stumbled across the concept in a recent New York Times article on ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) which is a sensation similar to what I feel from music, but triggered by some very different, very Google-worthy shit. ASMR doesn’t do anything for me, but I’m curious, so I read the article anyway, and in the middle of the piece, there was a reference to musical frisson.
The author described musical frisson like this: “…a thrilling ripple of chills or goose bumps (technically termed piloerection) over one’s body in emotional response to music.”
Piloerection. There’s that sort of sexual angle again. Gross, right? But it is a dopamine release, just like sex, and it describes the way I feel music in my body perfectly.
Reading that one simple paragraph was like I’d found the key to a locked box I’d been trying to open for years. Suddenly, I understood why I can listen to the same song on repeat into infinity. Why I listen to noisy, abrasive music to fall asleep.
When I share the music I listen to, my friends ask me: “How can you listen to that?”
I’ve been a music-lover as far back as I can remember, but it wasn’t until 1994 that I discovered noise music. I was fifteen years old, and that summer, my parents purchased a cable TV subscription for the first time. If you were watching MTV that summer too, you might remember some of the videos in constant rotation: "Black Hole Sun" by Soundgarden, "Sabotage" by the Beastie Boys, and "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails.
"Closer" caught my attention, but not in a good way. The beating heart strapped to the chair, pumping steam in time to a pitched-down sample of the kick drum from Iggy Pop’s "Nightclubbing." The bald, masked nude woman spinning eggs on her fingertips. The crucified monkey. Cockroaches. Francis Bacon meat wings.
My reaction, the first time I saw it: “What. The. Fuck.”
And that was just the video. The music itself was more than I could handle. It sounded so cluttered: The distorted heartbeat and the creepy, barely-audible tape-loop underneath it, followed by a baseline so strange I still don’t know how to describe it, the metronome, and Trent Reznor’s clean vocals alongside the echoing, distorted Help me choir. That’s all in the first minute. When Reznor whispers I want to fuck you like an animal for the first time, the song explodes into barely-contained chaos. There are so many layers I can’t keep track of them all, and every sound fights against the others for attention. It’s an abrasive and violent song, unafraid to throw conventional song structure in the trash bin. The last three minutes of the song are nearly vocal-less, almost pure noise. It builds and builds until the whole machine tears itself apart, closing out to a damp piano and another warbling, off-balance tape loop.
I was into punk-rock that summer: Nirvana, Green Day, The Offspring. Pop-punk, in other words. A little noisy, maybe, but still rooted in a high-gloss pop music sound.
Looking back, it makes a lot more sense, now that I know about musical frisson, that the much-noisier In Utero is my favorite Nirvana album. While everyone else was listening to "Heart-Shaped Box" or "All Apologies," my favorite track on that album is "Radio Friendly Unit Shifter," which has to be at least 104% feedback and noise.
I must have seen the music video for "Closer" hundreds of times. And over the course of that summer, I fell in love with that song. There was something about it I couldn’t put my finger on. I was obsessed with it. I know what it was now, of course: The tingles and the chills. Piloerection.
On my sixteenth birthday, I bought myself a present. I picked up a copy of The Downward Spiral on CD, after work, just before my favorite indie record store closed for the night. I went straight home and opened the package up. I’d never seen anything like the care that went into the packaging of that album. The heavy-duty cardboard slipcover. The slimline jewel case. The thick, stapled booklet filled with Russell Mills’s abstract art. Rust and salt and moths and teeth and feathers.
I put on some headphones and fired the CD player up. I made it a little more than halfway through the album before I fell asleep.
You’d think that means I was bored. Exactly the opposite. My body was on fire. I’d never listened to something so noisy and chaotic. The Downward Spiral seemed built from the ground up to trigger those tingles and chills that music can make me feel.
When the 10th-anniversary deluxe edition of TDS came out in a 5.1 surround sound mix, I picked up a copy, and just like the day I turned sixteen, I went home, threw on a pair of 5.1 headphones, put the album on and closed my eyes. You wouldn’t believe what those buzzsaw synths at the end of "Closer," circling 360 degrees around me, do to me. I’ll spare you. It’s kind of obscene.
The ASMR community uses the sounds of whispers in a light Russian accent, tapping fingernails, and rustling paper to help relax or fall asleep. The Downward Spiral was my gateway drug to noise music, and it helped me understand that music that sounds like a vacuum cleaner fucking an off-balance washing machine can be very relaxing too.
+ + +
Here’s a handful of some of my favorite frisson-triggering tracks, along with a brief description of what it is about the song that triggers me. Put on some headphones, listen along, and see if it happens for you.
All I Need - Radiohead
Okay, so Radiohead isn’t noise music, but there are some noise elements in their music.
It starts early: From the opening, each layer added to the song, the synths followed by the drumbeat, then the low, buzzing bassline and vocals, kicks off a wave of frisson when it arrives. Other triggers in the first half of the song include:
The ringing noise that begins at the end of each measure around 1:15.
The piano chords, strings and xylophone at 1:43.
The cymbals and static that begin in the background at 1:50, then slowly build to a roar around 2:20 before suddenly cutting out completely.
Where the song triggers me like a motherfucker, though, is at 2:45, when the heavy piano chords start up. The shift in the drums at 2:55, the arrival of new synths and horns at 3:00, and finally, when the vocals return at 3:13. This final section of the song is blanketed with white noise from a viola sustaining every note in the scale simultaneously, which keeps the song triggering waves of chills through my whole body for a minute straight.
Broken Witch - Liars
They Were Wrong, So We Drowned by Liars was pretty much despised by critics when it came out in 2004. Their first album was noisy, but at least you could dance to it. Spin Magazine referred to TWWSWD as “unlistenable.” It’s that grating. It’s probably no surprise that it’s my favorite Liars album to date.
The series of mechanical creaks and groans that alternate with a low, rumbling beep to kick off the track send waves of chills through my body. It’s the way they lie next to each other. Completely arrhythmic and unpredictable. The wave of chills happens on the beep, and the strange thing is when the creaking noise cuts out for a few seconds around 0:19, the series of beeps that follow on their own over the next 3 seconds do nothing for me.
This song is a frisson-generating engine, with all the starts and stops, the subtle or sometimes drastic shifts in sound. Triggers include:
The brief entry and disappearance of the drums from 0:23 to 0:26
The drone that appears briefly at 1:44
The new, more urgent drum beat at 1:48
The clack of the drumsticks against each other at 1:55
The bloodchant from 2:38 to 2:51
The entry of the machine-like drumbeat at 2:51
The Red Wing - Fuck Buttons
My roommate came home while I was blasting this track as loud as I could stand it. He happened to walk in seconds after the grinding drone starts up at 0:22. When he heard it, he texted me this:
‘Nuff said.
+ + +
Header image courtesy of Igor Moukhin. To view a photo essay of his work, go here.
+ + +
Kevin Meyer is a writer and student teacher in Tom Spanbauer’s Dangerous Writers workshop, and Publisher at Noisehole. His work has been published in The Frozen Moment: Contemporary Writers on the Choices That Change Our Lives, SharePDX, Nailed Magazine, and Noisehole. His novel-in-progress, currently titled Two Shots, explores asthma, domestic violence, and why it’s not such a good idea to keep easy access to firearms on the worst day of your life. Learn more about him at his official site.