Why Some Songs Give You Goosebumps

You are listening to a song you have heard many times. The music builds, a new voice comes in, and suddenly a shiver runs across your shoulders and the hairs on your arms stand up. A second later it is gone. Nothing in the room changed. Only the sound did.

Researchers call this experience musical “chills” or “frisson.” It is one of the few intense emotional reactions that people can reliably bring on by pressing play, which has made it a useful window into how the brain turns sound into pleasure.

What the body is doing

Chills are not only a feeling. They come with measurable changes in the body. In a pioneering brain-scanning study, people’s reports of chills were accompanied by changes in heart rate, electromyogram, and respiration, the second being a measure of muscle activity. A later study in Japan found that self-reported chills increased electrodermal activity and subjective arousal. Electrodermal activity is a tiny change in how well the skin conducts electricity, often used as a sign that the body’s arousal system has switched on. That study also found that a song that gave chills was perceived as being both happy and sad, a hint that chills often come from mixed feelings rather than pure joy.

The brain’s reward system joins in

The pioneering study, published in 2001, used positron emission tomography (PET), a scan that tracks blood flow in the brain. Its participants were McGill University students (age range: 20–30), five female and five male, with at least 8 years of music training. Each chose a piece that reliably gave them chills, and in a neat design choice, each subject’s selected music was used as another subject’s emotionally “neutral” control. As chills grew more intense, blood flow changed in brain regions thought to be involved in reward/motivation, emotion, and arousal, including ventral striatum, midbrain, amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and ventral medial prefrontal cortex. The authors noted that these structures are known to be active in response to other euphoria-inducing stimuli, such as food, sex, and drugs of abuse.

A 2011 study went a step further by tracking dopamine, a chemical messenger linked to reward and motivation. Using a PET method sensitive to dopamine, it found endogenous dopamine release in the striatum at peak emotional arousal during music listening. With a second kind of scan, it found that the caudate was more involved during the anticipation and the nucleus accumbens was more involved during the experience of peak emotional responses. So the brain seems to respond not only to the peak moment, but also to the build-up before it, the part where you can tell the big moment is coming.

Testing cause, not just correlation

Brain scans show what happens alongside chills. They cannot show that dopamine causes the pleasure. A 2019 study tried to get closer to cause. In a double-blind design with healthy participants (n = 27), each person took a drug that boosts dopamine (levodopa), a drug that blocks it (risperidone) and a placebo, in separate sessions. Compared with placebo, levodopa increased the hedonic experience and music-related motivational responses, risperidone led to a reduction of both. Not everyone had chills: 16 (out of 27) participants reported chills during the placebo session. Among them, chill responders spent more time reporting chills following levodopa than risperidone.

Dopamine may not be the whole story. In another double-blind study, people took naltrexone, a drug that blocks one type of opioid receptor, the brain’s own “natural painkiller” system. While listening to music they found intensely pleasurable, both positive and negative emotions were attenuated. The authors themselves point to a limit on generalizing: participants came from a university community, which may not represent everyone.

What in the music triggers them

Chills tend to arrive at particular moments. A 2021 paper, summarizing earlier research, lists features usually associated with the experience of chills, such as sudden dynamic changes, increased roughness, crescendi, or the entrance of new instruments. A computer analysis of 988 tracks previously reported to elicit chills, compared with similar songs by the same artists, confirmed that tracks which cause chills were sadder than matched tracks. In more exploratory results, chill tracks were also slower, less intense, and more instrumental on average. These features came from Spotify’s audio measurements, which are an indirect description of the music rather than a test of what each listener felt.

Why you might get them and your friend might not

Some people get chills all the time. Others rarely or never do. One study compared 10 participants who reported perceiving chills to music consistently with 10 who reported them rarely or never. Using a type of scan that maps the brain’s wiring, it found that the chills group showed higher volume in tracts connecting hearing-related areas with regions involved in emotion and social processing. With 20 people in total, this is an intriguing lead rather than a settled fact, and it cannot tell whether the wiring causes the chills or develops from a lifetime of strong reactions to music.

A much larger online study of 2,937 participants, using music and audiovisual clips, looked at what predicts chills. The features that predicted chills were age, sex, pre-exposure arousal, predisposition to Kama Muta (KAMF), and absorption. Pre-exposure arousal means how stirred up someone already felt before the clip began. Kama muta is the feeling of being deeply moved or touched, and absorption describes a tendency to become fully immersed in an experience. Together these factors gave 73.5% accuracy in predicting the occurrence of chills. The sample was drawn mainly from people residing in Southern California, so the results may not transfer to every culture.

What is still uncertain

Most brain studies of chills are small. The 2001 study had 10 participants, all trained musicians chosen because they got chills reliably, and the wiring study had 20. The drug studies are stronger on cause but changed the whole brain’s chemistry, not only the circuits involved in music. Chills are also measured mostly by asking people to press a button or report them, which depends on attention and honesty. And researchers do not yet know why the same song can give you chills one day and nothing the next.

The takeaway

When a song gives you goosebumps, your body’s arousal system and your brain’s reward circuits appear to be working together. Brain-imaging studies link chills to the same reward regions involved in food and other pleasures, and drug studies suggest dopamine and the brain’s opioid system both play a part. Chills tend to come at moments of change in the music, and they often carry a touch of sadness. Whether you get them seems to depend partly on who you are, including how easily you become absorbed in an experience. If you rarely get chills, you are far from alone: in the dopamine study above, 11 of the 27 participants did not report chills during the placebo session.