The relationship between valence and chills in music: A corpus analysis

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20416695211024680

Chills experienced in response to music listening have been linked to both happiness and sadness expressed by music. To investigate these conflicting effects of valence on chills, we conducted a computational analysis on a corpus of 988 tracks previously reported to elicit chills, by comparing them with a control set of tracks matched by artist, duration, and popularity.

We analysed track-level audio features obtained with the Spotify Web API across the two sets of tracks, resulting in confirmatory findings that tracks which cause chills were sadder than matched tracks and exploratory findings that they were also slower, less intense, and more instrumental than matched tracks on average.

We also found that the audio characteristics of chills tracks were related to the direction and magnitude of the difference in valence between the two sets of tracks.

We discuss these results in light of the current literature on valence and chills in music, provide a new interpretation in terms of personality correlates of musical preference, and review the advantages and limitations of our computational approach.

https://qz.com/2071652/a-spotify-playlist-with-715-songs-known-to-give-people-chills

In the end, certain characteristics about music that prompt chills emerged from the data. On average, they were “sadder, slower, less intense, and more instrumental than matched tracks.” What made a chills-inducing song carried the hallmark of “sophisticated music,” as music researchers call it. Here, sophistication means “relaxing, quiet, nondanceable, slow, nonelectric, and instrumental,” as they explain in the paper, which was published by the journal i-Perception.

As a byproduct of the study, de Fleurian and Pearce produced an epic song list for chills-seekers in their supplemental material. It includes the stirring pieces you’d expect, like Prince’s “Purple Rain,” Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black,” and a few versions of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” but also some techno, scores of works by Rachmaninoff and Mahler, and tracks from more obscure artists.