• Do you feel frisson?: There’s a recent article on the website Big Think that put a name to a physical experience I’ve enjoyed my whole music-listening life. They call the phenomenon “frisson,” aka aesthetic chills, and the article attempts to link the sensation of an emotional, goosebump-inducing response to certain musical passages to its evolutionary advantage.
Without diving too deeply into the article’s scientific jargon (read it here: https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/frisson-song-playlist/) the article focuses on a phrase coined by musicologist David Huron in 2006. “Contrastive valence theory” states the if we’re briefly in an emotionally "bad" state, the sudden onset of good feelings that follow are enhanced. Huron used the example of a surprise party. A brief moment of fright when everybody yells unexpectedly is typically followed by extreme pleasure, with the pleasure being more pronounced than if the guest of honor had walked into a birthday party they knew was happening. When the human appraisal response determines an uncertain situation contains no threat, contrastive valance kicks in with a wave of positive emotions.
As it applies to music, contrastive valence tends to kick in with sudden changes in tempo, volume, or dynamics the listener isn’t expecting. There’s a brief moment of appraisal, followed by a wave of heightened positivity, leading to goosebumps, muscle relaxation, a lump in the throat, even tears. We complicated humans can have the same reaction to films, books, or any other type of art, including Mother Nature’s. In a nutshell, Huron contends that our capacity to experience frisson is a modern-day remnant of the finely-tuned threat detection ability that served our ancestors well in keeping them alert and alive.
Do you feel frisson when you listen to music? Personally, I seek it out. I want to be surprised and thrilled by new music to the point where goosebumps kick in. I don’t even mind the occasional lump in my throat. The world is full of opportunities for natural highs, and aesthetic chills are one of my favorites. Note: There’s a 750-song playlist embedded in the article, created by neuroscientists and intended to spur a little frisson for the listener if you’re curious, or just want a little rush.
• Artists vs. Art: This is a thorny problem, and I wrestle with it. Why am I able to overlook the bad behavior of certain artists and still derive great pleasure from their work and not others? I’m very familiar with the well-documented stories of Picasso's monumental sexism, for example, but I can still admire his paintings with the same amount of pleasure and admiration I felt in art history class. Woody Allen will always be one of my favorite American filmmakers, despite the accusations that have been hurled at him in recent years. Several books have been written about the reprehensible conduct of the members of Led Zeppelin during their touring days, but they haven’t stopped me from dropping the needle on Physical Graffiti with the usual tingly anticipation. And yet, I find I can’t listen to a single note of Eric Clapton or Van Morrison these days with even a tiny bit of enjoyment, following their misguided anti-vax pronouncements of the last couple of years. Is it because their offense is rooted in today’s political polarization? Is that more egregious than the trashing of society’s accepted standards of morality? Have I become too politically polarized to separate the artist from the art? Have we all? Is that a good or bad thing? I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts.
• Record prices: Universal Music Group, the world’s largest manufacturer and distributor of recorded music, announced last week they were raising the list prices of more than 2500 titles in their vinyl record catalog. By a lot. $10 to $15 per title. The Beatles, for example, will see all of their single LP titles jump from $25 to $36. Although UMG has yet to make any sort of public statement, there have been the usual rumblings going around about inflation, the cost of raw materials and transportation, etc., the usual suspects. But there’s a bigger-picture view of the unprecedented increase that feels like the ring of truth to me.
The huge resurgence in the popularity of vinyl records that started around 2007, and has accelerated every year since, caught record labels and manufacturers by surprise. CDs and online platforms had pretty effectively killed off the industry in the previous decade, most of the vinyl record pressing plants around the world had been closed and shuttered, supply and distribution chains broken. The resurgence of interest and popularity happened so quickly labels have been seriously struggling with supplying the newly reborn demand for the last several years. New albums are on a waiting list to be pressed that can stretch out to many months, even years. Records can be completely finished and still have to wait up to a year for printing presses to schedule the making of their album covers. It’s possible the record labels are trying to slow down the hard-to-handle growth to re-tool their supply chains and pressing plants to accommodate the high demand, kind of like putting a patient into a medically induced coma to save their life. The so-called online vinyl community is rife with polls these days showing that a large majority of record buyers (at least those who spout off on social media) plan to drastically slow down or stop their new LP buying, starting now. The question is, can the patient be revived at some later date? Will UMG lower retail prices when they can supply more product, or will vinyl record collecting become a hobby for the wealthy and the speculators? My gut isn’t optimistic.
• Why Friday?: For the majority of my music listening and collecting life, new records were released to the public on Tuesday every week. New Music Tuesday was a phrase used by record stations, periodicals, and, eventually, websites. A few years ago the day quietly changed to Friday. I finally decided to dig around a bit and find out why. Turns out, prior to 2015, there wasn’t a global universal music release date. The United States and a few other countries used Tuesday, primarily to boost their “first week of sales” figures, but other parts of the world used different days, later in the week. The arrival of the internet, with easily available music downloading (legal or not) hot on its heels, led to new albums being pirated in global markets that had a later release date than the U.S., suppressing overall sales significantly. A global agreement was reached between Billboard, owners of the world’s most influential sales metrics, and the recording industry to formalize Fridays as a worldwide release date for new music. Billboard adjusted their new release charts to track “first calendar week” sales instead, and the pirates were shown the gangplank, at least to a degree.
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