music, adrenaline, performance?

if you google music and adrenaline, you'll find lots of articles about how our bodies respond to music, etc. much like in sports, you can sometimes hit some sort of "rush" or adrenaline and maybe do something which feels outside of your natural talents, or difficult to repeat again. i'm curious if anyone has ever experienced this with music?

i've had this happen maybe a few times, to where i get excited and have maybe played something, like a guitar run, that i normally can't do. like a one-time excitement "take". it's like it happens automagically and i know i can't duplicate it. is it adrenaline and excitement taking over? has anyone else experienced an excitement or adrenaline "rush" that took over and affected their playing?

even with singing, depending on the lyrics, it's not out of the ordinary to have some tears run down my face.

inquiring minds want to know :)

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What you write sounds very healthy to me and I really can understand and feel this too.
Kind of Flow state? I value those moments of Joy very much.

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Yep, know that feeling. Don`t know if it`s an adrenaline rush, but some magic happens in the mind that takes me to a different place for a moment and then the afterglow sets in. And it`s not neccessarily only active playing. The same sensation can happen when I start "feeling" tracks I listen to. Might have something to do with letting go and drifting into a more emotional state.

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Feeling and understending atmosphere of tracks is must. Rest is various technics and again internal feeling and ideas,how to do. Important is creativeness,open mind once playing. i am happy when see how some track turning to diferent direction and getting new life.

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I have a example:
My first Wikiloops meeting, first time we play for real with Martin (mpointon) and Marc (Marceys): I made a guitar solo totally out of control.
I figured out I was « in Transe » when Marc was looking at me with a big “come on guy” smile.
I could see my fingers moving by themselves!

Globally I play music for emotion. I don’t perform an instrument. When others give you Chills that’s so good when you surprise yourself by yourself, it’s unique.

Alchemy with others is about cross-feeling in sharing vibes, what you catch from whom you play with and what you send them.
That works well in this wikiloops place!! :)

We are lucky to have Music in order to “feel” some life moment instead of just “living” them even if we can loose our mind :)

Soul food for good mood

Ah… and what about listening to Anne Cozean ‘s voice ?? ;)

HugsFromTof

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The ASMR effect is real and if you add it to your song title on YouTube you'll get more attention. I call it the tingle factor and when it hits you it's a very physical thing from the top of your head to the middle of your stomach.

In case anyone didn't know already, ASMR stands for autonomous sensory meridian response; a sensation in response to specific triggering audio or visual stimuli.

I have a problem listening to very emotive songs (especially from my youth) the whole package of memories makes me sad rather than happy

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Yes. It is a great feeling. For me it occur most often during live performance while soloing in free form jam. Sometimes the tears flow.
A wonderful euphoric mind set that I wish I could summon at will but it is elusive.

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What a beatiful exchange here :) Let me add to this...

Rootshell starts out mentioning adrenaline... I won't go into chemical details here, but to my belief, adrenaline is not what causes that magical state we are talking about here.
Adrenaline puts you in fight mode, muscles get tense and your vision gets narrower - that's what you have when stage fright hits you before the first song is happening, and which hopefully goes away once you got rolling.
There will be some kind of hormone (most likely endorphins) responsible for the sensation, but that's just the chemical part.

The ASMR thing Shamika added (I was not familiar with the term) seems like a possibly better approach of describing the phenomenon, but then again, if you think of music as stimuli, I do believe there are different kinds of triggers for emotional reactions at play here:

Some are individual (like your emotions when hearing songs you heard when you were younger),
others are cultural (why do people cry when listening to their national anthem - which may have little emotional appeal to other nations people - that's a cultural thing for ya),
and there seem to be some things which work on any human being, too (which I find most interesting for the universal experience).

I'll be bold and claim to be able to trigger some ASMR response in pretty much any type of group of humans by playing a groove on some drum. They have to be physically present tho, and they should be listening, too.

But as I read rootshells initial question, his topic is rather the weird experience of playing unexpected things (which one most likely didn't think one of capable of).
That is a different thing, which I have experienced as well, but which does not seem reproduce able in the way the ASMR thing does.

If you play drums like I have for many years, you have a lot of experience watching your hands do things which happen more quickly than you could possibly "think" them, the experience of playing some really cool drumroll and thinking "now, how did I do that?" happens quite often, especially as you begin.
Now, the state described by rootshell and Tof goes a lot further than that: It's a state where you are surprised not only by a single lucky moment, but where you produce a coherent time span of such surprising moments. That's like surfing a wave or riding a unicycle and wondering how come one has not fallen off yet, I'm very familiar with the feeling. The "I doubt this will last much longer" part of the experience is driving in additional adrenaline, if you give that too much room, it will kick you off the surfboard from my experience.
Like I said, I don't know if you can make this happen on purpose, I don't think I can.

What I have come to believe is that there are rare moments where humans are truly in sync with themselfs and with the universe, and if that is the case and you happen to be playing music, these flowing experiences may happen.
I have never read of anyone who experienced this who did not describe it as a good feeling, there is nothing scary about it.
Maybe the "surprising" creativity and playing quality one can access in that state is not at all exceptional or vanishes,
maybe it is the level we are truly and constantly capable of - we may just not be able to access it deliberately or by force, it might need certain inner conditions or outer stimuli to unlock that potential.

LittleWings type of self-affirmation is a good example of trying to tune one-self. Thanks for sharing that! As always, such techniques have some esoteric dissonance about them when you read about them and instantly rationalize about them, but to light a candle and practise something IS a different experience.
Our ratio might frown upon that, but still, it does do something to us, doesn't it.
To me, it boils down to : It might pay off and unlock some otherwise hidden potentials by doing some things that will escape rational thinking. I'm not talking about LSD or weird stuff, I'm just saying don't try to find the entrance by thinking, that won't work from my experience.

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#274366 Because it might explain the phenomenon musically I uploaded something of mine... hope that's ok ?

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so that is what that is. i seem to get a huge ASMR response / tingle from saxophone...it's probably the only instrument that gives me those tingles/chills...especially during a live performance. something about the sax that just makes the hair on the back of my neck standup :o

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This is what keeps me making music. Not often, but a few times jamming with friends it has seemed as if nobody was playing the tune, we're all playing to something that isn't there at all and no matter what each of us does it continues. We looked at each other and saw we were all experiencing this, we laughed and smiled but above all we did not stop when this happened! We never understood it, we could not say it was due to any one of us "leading" or playing exceptionally well. On occasion it happened when we were deliberately playing very loose and even testing it by trying to break it with obscure playing that should not work. This is why I described it as playing to something that was not there, it seemed impossible to play a wrong note no matter how hard we tried. Maybe that's jazz. lol.

On Nick's original post - oh yes, all the time, I can never repeat anything I play that's good, it comes from the heart or the soul and any attempt to deliberately recreate is doomed for that reason.

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Nice topic indeed :)

And: isn't what you describe called "the flow"? See for example the explanation in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)#Music
- but the whole topic in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology) is interesting...

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