Start listening at the beginning of the Gloria (well, listen to the whole thing if you can, but if you're pushed for time start here):
https://youtu.be/4jmxJa4kMGM?t=131
The famous frisson moment in this recording is at 2m57: "as it was". Three reasons. One is the shifting chords in the organ part and the tenor/bass parts that lead up to it (the "expectancy violations"). The second is just the pure thrill of trebles soaring to a top A like that. And the third you only get if you listened to the Magnificat beforehand, which in its natural environment - a service of choral Evensong - you would: the "as it was" in the Gloria of the Nunc is _almost_ exactly the same as it was in the Mag... just a beat later. Pure "expectancy violation" again.
Howells is full of these moments. The big, crunchy, discordant Amen in the Gloria of the Magdalen Service is my favourite - where the harmonies are offset by a crescendo/diminuendo/crescendo sequence in the choir, all on the same note.
Listening to Funkadelic's Maggot Brain album while under the influence of strong hallucinogens turned my regular frissons into full blown waves of pleasure in my body, which I remember were directly correlated to harmony, call-and-response and the play of consonance and dissonance that's so taken for granted in music.
A dissonant chord would make me tense up, and the subsequent resolution would just feel like a blanket of warm pleasure rolling over me.
It was probably the most ecstatic I’ve ever felt in my entire life.
I will never ever forget that day.
Another DT song moment that gets me is in Scarred, climaxing with the lyric "Sometimes I feel I should face this alone, My soul exposed, It calms me to know that I won't".
I'll contribute Stellenbosch University Choir's rendition of Say Something (by A Great Big World and Christina Aguilera). The arrangement capitalizes on the choir's dynamic range; by remaining relatively soft throughout, the sudden loud, tutti passages (1:38 & 3:51) have great effect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdnPAIFn32A
I find that choral performances of pop songs work really well, though they're regrettably but understandably rare. Interestingly, the focus on dynamics isn't present in the original, duet, or Pentatonix version of Say Something, so no frisson moments there. Someone listed Bohemian Rhapsody--can also compare with Stellenbosch's version:
The interesting bit is that many European languages have converged on the same juxtaposition of the lexemes <pop><choir>, with the former consistently being a loanword from English. That is, there are lots of search results to be found by translating literally to terms like popchor (German), popkoor (Dutch), поп-хор (several Slavic languages), or popcoro (several Romance languages), plus hyphen and space variations.
It's a classic Sabbath style tune with a hard hitting riff, solid drums, vocals and all that. The song seems to be winding down after the 4 minute mark with a standard fade out.
But then something magical starts at 4:23.
Gives me the chills every single time.
Queen, Bohemian Rhapsody @ 3:05
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ9rUzIMcZQ&t=150
Pink Floyd, Echoes @ 19:12
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBca3xf-j3o&t=840
Pink Floyd, Atom Heart Mother @ 19:10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fku7hi5kI-c&t=1080s
Ozzy Osbourne, No More Tears @ 4:10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CprfjfN5PRs&t=220
Styx, Come Sail Away @ 2:30
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5MAg_yWsq8&t=140s
Metallica, Master of Puppets @ 4:50 (mentioned in the article)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0obBdrfUMzU&t=270s
Meatloaf, Bat out of Hell @ 7:38
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7ES7ueI7p0&t=420s
Eric Clapton, Layla (original version) @ 3:10
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WUdlaLWSVM&t=170s
Piano Guys ft. Taylor Swift & Coldplay, Love Story Meets Viva La Vida @ 3:43
I got an unskippable YT double ad at exactly 3:42. I hate YT so freaking much.
A Change of Seasons is one of the greatest compositions of all time, in my opinion.
Breaking All Illusions is another track that just gives “that feeling” though it’s a bit “musically dense” so it might take a few listens to really digest it for some.
Disappear and The Spirit Carries On are also the only songs that have ever made me cry like a baby.
There are a couple of songs giving me chills when I'm singing them myself. Not every time, only when I'm in a appropriate mood. So expectation violation doesn't seem a cause.
I don't know exactly what "contrasive valence" is, but it sounds more like it. I think my chills correlate with a qualitative change in an emotions. The short moment when one emotion is transformed into other induce frisson. Some change in a way how I interpret things, or how I feel about them, or both. It must correlate with some properties of a music, because it is one of the ways to change emotional content, but it is not the cause. Sometimes it is one of the causes in a chain of causes.
Thinking about it, not every transformation of emotions gives me chills, sometimes I get tears in my eyes without any chills.
I saw Floor Jansen live last month. It was to a different song, but it was the first time ever that live music gave me goosebumps. And I've seen a lot of live music.
Her cover of Phantom of the Opera with Hank Poort is absolutely divine.
on the theme of Nordic chills, does anyone remember Árstíðir - Heyr himna smiður (Icelandic hymn) in train station?
A few years later I launched metalgasm.com (early 2000s), it is offline now, but it was a place to record your metalgasms or frissons (which I never had heard of until now) with timestamps so people could explore new metal and sort by sub-genre tag and know which songs are the most metalgasmic and which parts to look out for. There is so much to discover and sometimes you think you don't like a genre, but you just haven't found the right band or songs to get you started.
I can tell you that Ghost Love Score had the most entries and Dream Theater made up most of the rest of the site. It's fun to look through what's still on the Internet Archive. Maybe I should rebuild and launch the site again for fun.
It's just so incredibly well-done that I feel like even people who only listen to classical and jazz, or whatever, would have to acknowledge they really landed something there.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6W6HhdqA95w (4:25 would be a good place to start, but it's not nearly as good if you don't listen to the whole thing)
Some examples, each about 10 seconds before.
https://youtu.be/ir5_fajcohM?t=252 (whole sequence has many, this one the biggest) https://youtu.be/t3mA6gwPbzw?t=42 https://youtu.be/7oelg2Ik8-M?t=35
High pitched vocals also often do it: https://youtu.be/bo_efYhYU2A?t=96
Or amazing visuals paired with music: https://youtu.be/65zm8ozcWl4?t=120 https://youtu.be/YFR-cJ4OM6M?t=422
Carlo Gesualdo, Tenebrae Responsories. Three nights full of "Expectancy violations", unparalleled word painting, cross relations... definitely do reference the text in translation, because the word painting is a huge part of the beauty of the work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OtYMrQjbSak (1 of 27)
Bruckner, 4th symphony, finale. https://youtu.be/o0g82i784bw?t=4440
Bruckner, 8th symphony, finale. https://youtu.be/elVHvTrEM34?t=5610
The 8th symphony is titanic, but worth it if you can set aside 2 hours. I like Celibidache's recordings best.
Before I learned of the name frisson, I always thought it was an adrenaline response.
One I remember from my childhood that always did the trick is the Yu-Gi-Oh theme https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MjdNz071O4E.
Edit: but yes, this key shift is rather beautiful and unexpected.
Interesting. The Spotify playlist didn't do much for me, but when I think of a couple moments in songs that always give me chills, they all feature that pattern:
Nightwish, Ghost Love Score, Wacken 2013 @ 9:22, affectionately nicknamed the "Floor-gasm" by fans. The melody line feels like it's already gone as high as she can possibly go and is just going to descend by a couple notes. Instead she takes it up another 5th to what feels like an impossibly high note, and then holds it there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47e_961OQWE#t=528
Dream Theater, A Change of Seasons, @ 13:01 and again @ 13:28. It follows one of the odd-time-signatures, chromatic-only jam sessions, and then the band teases an end multiple times starting @ 12:40. When the jam session finally resolves into 4/4 time and the guitar comes in with those held power chords, you're like "Ahhh...." and then just as you start grooving along to that rhythm, the guitars/bass/drums drop out entirely and it's just acapella vocals over keys.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZKrwJzGg0k#t=730