Appoggiatura and Adele

The WSJ has a piece about Adele (here), which describes why her song "Someone Like You" is such a "tear-jerker".

Twenty years ago, the British psychologist John Sloboda conducted a simple experiment. He asked music lovers to identify passages of songs that reliably set off a physical reaction, such as tears or goose bumps. Participants identified 20 tear-triggering passages, and when Dr. Sloboda analyzed their properties, a trend emerged: 18 contained a musical device called an "appoggiatura."

An appoggiatura is a type of ornamental note that clashes with the melody just enough to create a dissonant sound. "This generates tension in the listener," said Martin Guhn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia who co-wrote a 2007 study on the subject. "When the notes return to the anticipated melody, the tension resolves, and it feels good."

Indeed, after hearing that song for the first time I had an emotional response, and impulsively bought it from Amazon with a lingering $1 MP3 credit. The song is really quite good, and stands up to repeat listenings.

The WSJ didn't introduce me to Adele's famous song, but the idea that using Appoggiaturas could manufacture emotional songs piqued my interest.

Looking first using the Googles, I found some songs which enthusiasts claimed to use appoggiaturas, though none provoked anything close to the emotional response of Adele's song (REM's Camera, Steely Dan's Fire in the Hole).  I did discover a nice piano piece, Floyd Cramer's Last Date, but that likewise did not jerk the tears, so to speak.

Another piece I found that used syncopation and dissonance in addition to appoggiaturas was the Banjo by 19th century composer Gottschalk, a piece written for the Piano, but designed to take advantage of the then-popular banjo. I like the piece, but no chills.

Either the WSJ was lying (a possibility, though this seemingly wasn't a conservative conspiracy--their usual milieu) and appoggiaturas were nothing more than standard ornamentalism, , or else I needed to look elsewhere.  So I searched around for some academic papers by Dr Slobada to see if I could find the songs that he used in his experiment.

The most frequently cited papers on this topic seem to be Jaak Panksepp, "The Emotional Sources of Chills", which I looked to for some better examples. Apparently the song which was found to send the most shivers down the spine was Air Supply's Making Love Out of Nothing at All, (in replication by another researcher that number fell dramatically to <10% of listeners).  For myself, I didn't get any shivers.

Other pieces which inspired chills included Pink Floyd's The Post War Dream (no chills for me), Journey's Faithfully (some chills, especially around 1:25 and the end), Boston's Peace of Mind (no chills, but some Boston songs can give me chills), Howard Jones' No One is to Blame (nothing), and Cris Williamson's Wild Things (garbage song, no chills).

The WSJ article offers some hints of other songs and types:

Chill-provoking passages, they found, shared at least four features. They began softly and then suddenly became loud. They included an abrupt entrance of a new "voice," either a new instrument or harmony. And they often involved an expansion of the frequencies played. In one passage from Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 (K. 488), for instance, the violins jump up one octave to echo the melody. Finally, all the passages contained unexpected deviations in the melody or the harmony. Music is most likely to tingle the spine, in short, when it includes surprises in volume, timbre and harmonic pattern.

Though the cited example doesn't thrill me, I agree that surprises in volume, melody and harmony can create emotional tension, though whether that tension can be reliably manufactured into chills is another story.

If the sensation of chills can be reliably created through music, I have not seen evidence of it.