Sounds that send chills down your spine

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Sounds that send pleasant chills --

Waves at the beach
Children laughing -- and I don't even like kids! It just sounds so joyous. I wish I could feel like that again.
Clear DJ-quality baritone voices -- singing or speaking
String instruments -- violins, violas, cellos, guitars, pianos
Lovemaking sounds -- soft moans drive me crazy!
The grunts from our pot-bellied pig -- uhrnk uhrnk uhrnk

And one horrid one -- styrofoam pieces squeaking together

That scratchy sound used to make it cringe! Now for some reason it just makes me tingle. Maybe because I've lost high frequency hearing with age? Anyway, I think I can guess the reason for this -- an instinctive reaction to angry reptiles. Check out this video of a not-very-friendly rattlesnake:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaSeSIZ9Fgw

If you were an animal and you heard that or you heard hissing, it would probably be in your interest to be freaked.

Loud engines and loud voices.

Electric guitar

Rain

Thomas the tank engine's 'peep' sound

The NG feed pumps (at work) make a high pitched sound when finished or there's a problem

I have a kinder egg toy the makes a pop/click sound when pulling the pieces apart

Sometimes the lawnmower

Small motors running

That brain/spine tingle feeling is amazing!

I love the sound of people writing with pens and pencils. Sometimes the sound of my mother cutting and peeling vegetables gives me that feeling. If weren't for the sounds of pens and pencils, I would have had nothing to like about school when I was a kid. I also like the sound of dry erase markers on the white board.

When I was younger at meal times my brother always had to sit next to me and every time he chewed something his jaw would click. It was all I could hear at meal times and it drove me mad

Nails scratching on nylon stockings. Nails screeching on blackboard (classic). Forks against teeth.

Great sounds:
- The Finnish language/Finnish accents
- Scottish accents
- someone playing the hurdy-gurdy
- The interior hum of the TARDIS
- Flipping through a note book that's been written in with pen so all the pages are wonderfully crinkly
- Folk Metal, especially Eluveitie (partially due to the hurdy-gurdy)
- The theme song to the show Vikings ("If I had a heart") If I listen to it with headphones, turned up loud, my heart rate slows down and I end up feeling mesmerized, I snap out of it when the song ends.

When you walk into a nightclub or festival tent and the bass is so strong it makes your eyes wobble (well that MAY be a factor ;D) it's pure ecstacy.

The sound of a flute echoing in a forest

Faded, degraded, analogue, lo fi sounds

A really, really good, soulful female vocalist

Hardcore Techno

Throat singing

The sound of running water/rain/waterfalls

Wind blowing through leaves

The sound of the roland TB-303

Any quiet industrial area first thing on a morning

The sound of my deliveries arriving

Cars going past my window

The sound of grass being cut with scissors (???)

Two empty glass bottles clinking together - like a shard of ice through each ear...

Sometimes music does that to me, but it has to be right. Sometimes music that I can literally feel will do that to me. This will typically happen at some sort of live performance, but not the extremely awful noisy kind that is loud enough to break eardrums.

Pleasant chills down my spine - a good lyrical tenor voice.

The sounds I really hate are all types of highly compressed audio - pop music does it, so do adverts. Game show music tends to by highly compressed too. These sounds just overload me completely and I can't cope with it. Because of this I either mute adverts or, if I can, I skip forward over them, even the ones I am intersted in. I don't listen to pop music at all.


The reason for this high compression of modern audio is that the general population like louder sounds, so people, apparently, skip quiet songs on their MP3 player. Because both the tv / pop and the advertising people want you to listen more and more to their stuff and to like it they add loads of compression. Apparently it gives sound a 'punch'.

I only get chills down my spine from things I don't like.

Here are some of my examples:

-Orchestral music (especially movie soundtracks).
-Dramatic Choirs (especially if they're in Latin).
-A song that builds to a grand climax (an example is the song Memory from Cats).
-Certain tones and voices of singing (especially trembling ones).

Sorry I don't know the actual term for it, but when a singer's voice is going up or down in pitch and hits a certain transition spot where it gets (again, for lack of better terminology) rough, just for an instant.