User:Cjhartford20/Frisson

Proposed Changes: We plan to add a section what causes frisson. This section is dancing and how it affects frisson to come to life. We want to inform the audience on this unique experience as well as add it where it is deemed necessary throughout the article. We also want go through the article and clear up and confusing sentences for the general audience.

Causes

Violations of musical expectancy

Further information: Melodic expectation

Rhythmic, dynamic, harmonic, and/or melodic violations of a person's explicit or implicit expectations are associated with musical frisson as a prerequisite. A violation is a process which arouses emotion in a listener when a specific feature of music confirms, violates, or delays something. Loud, very high or low frequency, or quickly varying sounds (unexpected harmonies, moments of modulations, melodic appoggiaturas) has been shown to arouse the autonomic nervous system (ANS). Activation of the ANS has a consistently strong correlation with frisson, as one study showed that an opioid antagonist could block frisson from music. Leonard Meyer, a prominent philosopher of music, wrote in his text, “Emotion and Meaning in Music,” that music's ability to evoke emotion in the listener stems from its ability to meet and break expectations.

Dance Performances

Frisson can be induced by the nature of dance. Engaging in a dance performance involves both observing the dancers and hearing the music. This type of performance stimulates two sense modalities which include audition and vision. This scenario provides the means for frisson to occur, yet does not guarantee the conflict between audition and vision will trigger frisson.

Emotional contagion

Frisson can also be a product of emotional contagion. Researchers from the New York Academy of Sciences, reveal chill are a reliable indicator of emotional peaks and can be related to the reward system. Within the context of music, emotional contagion involves various musical devices, such as tonality, rhythm, and lyrics that imply emotion, triggering similar emotions in the listener. In "The Emotional Power of Music: Multidisciplinary perspectives on musical arousal, expression, and social control," Stephen Davies suggests that "music is expressive because we experience it as presenting the kind of carriage, gait, or demeanor that can be symptomatic of states such as happiness, sadness, anger, sassy sexuality, and so on."

Environment and social context

Frisson can also be amplified by one's environment and by the social context that the piece has been listened to. For example, if one listens to a movie soundtrack in a cinema, the overall volume and the film's story will provide intentional context, likely creating deeper emotional feelings of frisson in the listener. The culture and nationality of both the piece and the composer will affect the levels of frisson felt, or if frisson is even felt at all. If one is very familiar with music built on established Western musical traditions, deviations will violate the listener's expectations. If one is from a non-Western culture, deviations from western musical tradition may prove to have no effect on the listener. Jeanette Bicknell, writing for the “Journal of Consciousness Studies,” wrote, “Different musical cultures are based upon different patterns of tonal and rhythmic organization. These patterns of musical structure and meaning are social constructions that evolved through human musical practice."