Playlist spotify chill

Academics have spent years investigating why some songs give people chills, usually described as a pleasurable sensation of tingles, or a shiver, often accompanied by goosebumps.

One prominent assertion is that as we listen to music, our minds are racing ahead to imagine whats coming, and we get chills when our predictions are completely off. Perhaps the dynamic changes unexpectedly or a surprising instrument slides into the mix. Another possibility is that people who get chills have more connections between the auditory and reward systems in the brain. Still other scientists have proposed that people who are more empathetic are more prone to experience chills because of emotional contagion.

Recent research led by Rémi de Fleurian, a PhD candidate in the music cognition lab at Queen Mary University of London, supports yet another common finding: The songs that trigger chillsor frisson to scientistsare typically sad ones. What was perhaps more interesting about de Fleurians newest work, however, is how he conducted it.

A lot of previous work was either completely theoretical or based on studies which were run on a small group of participants, he explains, but his paper shows that you can do similar work, and achieve similar results with work that is entirely computational.

Goosebumps tend to come from sophisticated music

De Fleurian and his co-author, Marcus Pearce, a senior lecturer of music perception at the same university, combed through published studies and compiled a list of more than 700 songs that have been identified as being chills-inducing. Then, using data from Spotify, they matched each song with another piece by the same artist that was roughly equal in length and popularity. Next, they went about comparing the two pieces of music, analyzing several features, including each songs mood.

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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.

An epic playlist of chills-inducing music

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 youd expect, like Princes Purple Rain, Amy Winehouses Back to Black, and a few versions of Leonard Cohens Hallelujah, but also some techno, scores of works by Rachmaninoff and Mahler, and tracks from more obscure artists.

Weve created a Spotify playlist from nearly all of the tracks on de Fleurians chills collection. (We took inspiration from the 200+ Chills playlist shared on Twitter by Ethan Mollick, a professor of innovation at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.) Our 715-song list will take you more than 24 hours to listen to in full.

De Fleurian offers one caveat for anyone who listens: Some people report chills when a song has a personal connection, he says, meaning any song has the potential to produce chills. So, yeah, he says, Ive got some eyebrow-raising music in there.

Readers also may notice that songs from the 80s, 90s, and 00sincluding work by Death Cab For Cutie, Bon Iver, and plenty of Radiohead (not only Creep)seem to be overrepresented. That reflects the era when scientists conducted a flurry of research on chills, says de Fleurian. One of his forthcoming papers will include more recent pieces, such as Runaway by Kayne West, Loud Places by Jamie xx, and Ride by Lana Del Rey.

See the playlist below and click through to Spotify for the complete collection.