The chills

Getting goosebumps and what it means for us as musicians.

Sometimes I’m not sure I fully believe the things I write.

That’s why I write them. It’s a form of pressure-testing. I’m making the case to myself, and at the end of the process, I’ve got a much better idea of what I think.

But there are also times I write things that I want to believe, but I’m not sure I’m all the way there yet.

Someone I know once told me that if you’re not happy with something, you’ve got two options: You can change your circumstances or change your interpretation. (My brother’s response was: “what about changing someone else’s circumstances or interpretation?” which sounds a lot like it could come from a mobster holding a baseball bat: “I’m here to change your interpretation, buddy.”)

The only problem with this framework is that it’s not always easy to change your interpretation of something. Sometimes those interpretations are tied to deep-seated narratives and beliefs you might not even be fully aware of. We all tell ourselves a lot of stories about how the world works. It’s tough to update them.

A few years ago, my group Sontag Shogun published a cover of Thom Yorke’s “Dawn Chorus.” The original is so gorgeous. I love the way that the bass note changes, while the chord on top is on its own separate journey. There are so many tones that work over the bass notes, and Yorke cycles through many of them with his subtle chordal melody. He’s got the major 7th and 6th against the G, the suspended 4th over the D, and a G natural over B moving down to F#. I also love that I still to this day have no idea how many times he plays each chord before changing it. It seems to be different each time.

When we adapted it, we took the bass and this washy, tone-filled harmony and really strung it out in the middle. We buried the chords in these swelling tones that surrounded and subsumed it. We eased a deep low rumble into it. We teased some of the chord tones and extensions. And we tried to make the whole thing soar a bit with some sparkly sound design.

Helped along I’m sure by the popularity of the original, this cover has done well for us, especially the instrumental version. It has a few hundred thousand streams on both Spotify and Apple, and has popped up on thousands of personal playlists. What a nice surprise! It’s easy to get angry at the economics and dynamics of streaming, but this was one of those rare instances where the algorithms worked in our favor.

At some point, I started looking at some of these playlists in the Spotify for Artists app. There were a lot with nonsense names, a number with some version of “calming music,” and then a few more original ones, like “Do I clench my fists?” and “youknowwhatyoudid.”

But the one that always stuck with me the most was called “Why should I live?”

This morning, my wife sent me a Radiolab episode for my run called “The Holy Shiver.” I’m in marathon training right now, so welcoming suggestions. The episode basically asks the question: What’s the deal with goosebumps?

The reporters talk to a bunch of scientists and researchers. They explore the possible evolutionary origins of goosebumps, or at least the very tiny “muscle fibers attached to the base of every hair follicle under the skin.” These muscles would contract in moments of danger, threat, and high arousal, which could be useful for trapping a bit of extra warmth next to the skin or making the hair stand up on end to seem larger to a predator.

But sometimes you get goosebumps without the danger, what researchers call “aesthetic chills.” These are the chills you get when you listen to a piece of music that moves you deeply or you encounter an awe-inspiring natural vista or you feel the presence of some higher power.

A researcher named Félix Schoeller has been looking into these “aesthetic chills” for the best part of a decade or more. First, he gathered a big database of things that people reported gave them the chills — research discoveries, meaningful conversations, music, big sports comebacks, religious experiences, etc. Then, he started to develop some theories around them.

Schoeller argues that we get aesthetic chills when we encounter something that disrupts our worldview, something that reshapes our understanding of how things work or gets us to see things in a new way. He says it’s when we’ve touched “the limits of our cognition,” or when our brains simply “cannot compute” something we’re experiencing given what we think we know about the world. The chills may be our bodies telling us to pay attention, something important is happening.

In his view, that’s also why different people get goosebumps from different things, since we often come into an experience with our own context and beliefs about what it all means.

Schoeller and his team have demonstrated this in a series of experiments and now created a model that can predict with about 74% accuracy in experimental conditions how to give an individual participant the chills, based on how they answer some questions. They’re now exploring whether this ability to curate a set of experiences that can give someone goosebumps can’t challenge some of the possibly maladaptive stories we tell ourselves and improve mental health outcomes in the process. In other words, maybe giving someone the chills can help them with depression.

It’s not surprising to us musicians that music is one of the more reliable ways to give someone goosebumps. We’ve all been there at some point or other — a listening or playing experience that opened up some stunning realization about the world, maybe not even one we can put into words but we felt it all the same. I can remember the first time hearing Sigur Rós on the floor of my dorm room, or getting lost in a jam with friends, or just walking and looking up at the sky while listening to Jon Hopkins’s “Luminous Beings” and feeling connected to it all.

That might be because music defies so much of reality. It can be stunningly beautiful in a world often filled with ugliness. It can be transcendent in a world filled with mundanity. It can be a source of human connection and collaboration and generosity of spirit in a world too often devoid of such things.

Music offers up this rich emotional lens on what we’re seeing that can change your interpretation better than any mobster with a club.

There are times when I’m making music that I worry that making music is primarily a selfish endeavor. I do it because I love to do it. As a self-employed parent of three and partner with a lot of family responsibilities, there’s a certain guilt that comes along with that. Lord knows making music doesn’t bring in much money. Am I really justified in spending my time on making music? In a world filled with musicians, am I doing my part, contributing to humanity in the best way I can?

But then I go back to that playlist, the one called “Why should I live?”

I don’t know who made it. I don’t know the context behind it. I don’t even know if it’s serious or not. But I do know, as do many of us, what it can feel like to feel so drained by circumstances, by helplessness, by loneliness, by some powerful narrative that has a hold on us that it’s hard to see past it. And I know that music can help you out of that.

The idea that a song we made might have helped induce in someone the chills that helps them change that story is profoundly humbling. And hopeful. There’s a reason music has been with us since the very first humans began looking to the stars and each other for meaning. It’s a powerful force, as the researchers looking at aesthetic chills are discovering.

To be completely honest, I’m not 100% sure I believe what I’m writing here right now. I still have hang ups and guilt sometimes. I worry that I could be doing more to support my family and the world. I worry that making music, especially experimental music, can be hopelessly self-indulgent at times. And I know that music is just one small part of the immensely complex meaning-making machinery inside of each of us.

And yet, I will continue to do it, and to help others do it too.

Because it gives me the chills.

Onwards,
Ian

Ian Temple
Founder, Soundfly
Ian@Soundfly.com

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Five Interesting Things

1. I’ve been enjoying my Qobuz experiment. Joel Gouveia has a nice piece out making me feel even better about it. Better payouts, more human curation, more care to music and listening and artists. It’s not perfect, but I’m happier listening on Qobuz so far than Spotify, so planning for now to keep it. There might finally be a better ethical choice when it comes to streaming…

2. Amanda Petrusich is one of my favorite music journalists, so I always pay attention to what she writes. This piece on the science of grief for The New Yorker was really harrowing and powerful. It’s also a good reminder that you can follow someone closely and read their stuff without having any idea what’s actually going on behind it. “What a bold and miraculous thing—to be alive at all.”

3. I’ve read enough of Brian Eno to write a course on him at this point — and yet I still enjoy hearing him talk about his conception of music, especially since it’s often so different from mine. Yesterday, I spent some time listening to his appearance on Ezra Klein’s podcast, and it was interesting, as always. “Art is grown-up play. It’s a way of imagining things and imagining what they would feel like and imagining how they connect to other things that we know about — and then feeding that knowledge back into our lives and into our relationships.”

4. I saw The Odyssey this week, and enjoyed it! Honestly, I think that managing to pull out a coherent and concise-enough story from the epic poem to make a compelling film was a huge accomplishment in its own right. That said, I do remember from high school loving Odysseus’ mysteriousness and complexity and trickiness, and that all got a little lost. As such, I enjoyed hearing the translator Emily Wilson talk about Homer and translation and words and interpretations on this podcast with Derek Thompson.

5. This week, in my Draft // Echo program, we’re discussing INPUTS — the stuff you take in. It’s always interesting to me that many of the artists I’ve met I really admire have such a deep knowledge of the artists and music they love, whether it’s jazz artists that have transposed hundreds of solos or pop artists who can cite lyrics off with ease. And yet, so many of us feel overwhelmed by inputs or like we don’t have time for it. Do you have an approach to actively incorporating inputs into your creative process? Would love to hear about it.