The songs that are guaranteed to give you chills, according to science
One of the greatest things about music is that you can never really anticipate when a certain song is going to hit you in “the feels.” Yes, any scientific algorithm can suggest a string of “winter blues” tunes to scratch a basic itch, but as we all know, it’s sometimes the most innocuous summertime pop hit that can unexpectedly elicit goosebumps, or tears, or a sense of devastating loss.
Because the human race doesn’t yet share a single brain like the characters in Pluribus, scientists tend to have an uphill climb when it comes to analysing the many ways music affects each of us emotionally. A university study of these cause-and-effect relationships can’t account for a song triggering a very personal and powerful memory for an individual, so instead, we’re left to paint with a broader brush.
A few years back, a PhD candidate at Queen Mary University of London, Rémi de Fleurian, took a crack at identifying more of a universal understanding of one specific phenomenon in popular music, songs that give people chills. This wasn’t in the horror movie sense of sending a shiver down your spine, but the kind of chills the researchers call “frisson,” that more satisfying sort of emotional thrill you can get from being moved by a work of art in a dramatic or unexpected way. Physical goosebumps aren’t required, but often come along with the experience.
Everybody probably has a half dozen songs that spring to mind when remembering either a single chill-inducing moment or a repeatable one, a song that, by its nature, can deliver that effect whenever you hear it. For de Fleurian’s research, though, bringing in thousands of people to listen to or discuss thousands of songs wasn’t really in the budget.
In fact, rather than going through any headphone tests with humans, de Fleurian determined that “you can do similar work, and achieve similar results with work that is entirely computational,” according to an interview conducted with Quartz.
Leaning on the data collected by many previous studies about music and cognition, de Fleurian and his study’s co-author, Marcus Pearce, started their work by literally putting together a playlist of 700 songs that had already been identified by past researchers as having the chill gene.
This included some all-time classics: Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’, The Smiths’ ‘How Soon Is Now?’, Eric Clapton’s ‘Tears In Heaven’. And quite a few lesser-known indie mixtape types: Wilco’s “On and On and On’, Mazzy Star’s ‘Look On Down from the Bridge’, and Animal Collective’s ‘In the Flowers.’ There was also a boatload of classic pieces, a sprinkling of non-English-language pop music, and a noteworthy, somewhat concerning lack of almost any R&B or hip-hop.
From there, the researchers’ goal was to see what DNA these songs shared, beginning with what separated the selected tracks from other similarly popular, but less chilly, songs by the same artists.
Their findings? Not shocking really. After a detailed analysis, the 700 songs were found to be consistently “sadder, slower, less intense, and more instrumental than matched tracks.” They also tended to be classified as more “sophisticated,” i.e., “relaxing, quiet, nondanceable, slow, and nonelectric.”
Will every person who listens to one of these scientifically proven chill tracks experience the desired effect as promised on the tin? Of course not. But I suppose it could make for a weird party game to jump into 20 one of them, as we’ve gathered below, and see which one makes the most hairs stand on end.
20 songs guaranteed to give you chills:
- Sigur Ros – ‘Hoppipolla’
- David Bowie – ‘Ashes to Ashes’
- Kate Bush – ‘This Woman’s Work’
- Erik Satie – ‘Gymnopedie No. 1’
- The Cure – ‘Lovesong’
- Dionne Warwick – ‘Walk On By’
- Richard Thompson – ‘Beeswing’
- Radiohead – ‘Pyramid Song’
- Explosions in the Sky – ‘First Breath After Coma’
- Metallica – ‘Nothing Else Matters’
- Skunk Anansie – ‘Hedonism’
- Madvillain – ‘Operation Lifesaver’
- Joy Division – ‘Transmission’
- Gustav Holst – The Planets – ‘Mars’
- Prince – ‘Purple Rain’
- Au Revoir Simone – ‘Knight of Wands’
- Elvis Costello – ‘Alison’
- Cyndi Lauper – ‘Time After Time’
- Low – ‘Just Like Christmas’
- Vaughan Williams – ‘Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis’
