Music Chills: Why Some People Get Goosebumps From a Song and Others Never Do

A song you know comes on, that particular moment arrives, and a cold current runs up the back of your neck and makes the hair on your arms stand up. The person next to you, listening to exactly the same thing, feels nothing.

That response has a technical name: frisson, French for “shiver,” also known as aesthetic chills.

It has been studied for more than forty years, and today we know three curious things about it: not everyone gets it, it activates the same brain system as food or money, and the personality trait that best predicts it is not sensitivity but curiosity.

What is frisson?

In 1980, pharmacologist Avram Goldstein of Stanford University asked hundreds of people about what he called “thrills.” His description remains one of the most precise:

• They usually begin at the back of the neck and upper back.
• They spread to the scalp, arms and shoulders.
• They sometimes come with visible goosebumps, though not always.
• They are almost always experienced as pleasurable.

Music was the most common trigger, but never the only one. Among the music students in his survey, almost all had also felt them with scenes from films or books, with the beauty of a landscape or with a moment of sudden understanding.

That the same shiver can arrive in front of a symphony and in front of an idea suggests it is not a response to a specific stimulus but to a way of engaging emotionally with what we perceive.

Not everyone gets them

Figures vary widely depending on the sample and the definition, so round percentages deserve some suspicion:

• In Goldstein’s surveys, between half and nine in ten people felt them, depending on the group.
• In psychologist John Sloboda’s 1991 study, more than 80% of the 83 participants said they had felt chills from music.
• In a 2011 study by Emily Nusbaum and Paul Silvia, about 8% had never felt them, while others felt them daily.

And one figure is surprising: real, measurable goosebumps appear in fewer than half of chills. In a study using poetry, every participant felt chills, but only 41% showed objectively raised skin.

The trait that best predicts it: openness to experience

The interesting question is why some people get them and others do not. This is where the Big Five comes in.

Several studies have reached the same conclusion:

• Nusbaum and Silvia (2011) found that openness to experience was the best predictor of musical chills among the five major traits.
• Colver and El-Alayli (2016) confirmed it with 100 students, measuring frisson both through what they reported and through their skin conductance. The link appeared with almost every facet of openness: fantasy, aesthetics, feelings, ideas and values.
• Psychologist Robert McCrae showed in 2007 that the questionnaire item about feeling a chill in response to poetry or art is related to openness in 50 of the 51 cultures studied.

Openness to experience describes curiosity, aesthetic sensitivity and a taste for exploring. Colver and El-Alayli pointed out an intriguing nuance: the “ideas” facet, meaning cognitive attention to the music, might carry more weight than previously thought. It is not only the people who feel more who get the shivers, but the people who listen with more curiosity.

The finding is worth keeping at its real size:

• The link with openness is moderate, not decisive.
• In Nusbaum and Silvia’s study, engagement with music (listening often, valuing it, playing an instrument) explained part of that relationship.
• Part of the strength of the link comes from the fact that the chills question itself is part of classic openness questionnaires.

A 2022 study of more than 14,000 Dutch twins added another piece: about a third of the differences between people in the tendency to feel aesthetic chills would be explained by genetic factors, and the rest by each person’s experience.

What happens in the brain

In 2001, Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre of McGill University scanned people’s brains while they listened to the music that gave them, personally, chills. As the chills grew more intense:

• Activity increased in the ventral striatum, insula and orbitofrontal cortex, regions of the reward system that also respond to food or sex.
• It decreased in the amygdala and hippocampus.

Ten years later, Valorie Salimpoor and Zatorre went further: they measured dopamine release in eight people selected because they reliably got chills. They found two distinct moments:

• The caudate nucleus became active in the seconds before the climax, during anticipation.
• The nucleus accumbens became active at the moment of the chill.

So the brain enjoys it twice: while waiting for what is coming and when it arrives. In 2019, an experiment with drugs that raise or lower dopamine confirmed that this system directly influences musical pleasure.

Why certain passages trigger it

If chills depend on anticipation, it makes sense that surprises set them off.

Sloboda asked his participants to mark the exact passages that gave them chills, and when he analyzed them he found a pattern: new or unexpected harmonies were the most effective. Other work has linked chills to the entry of a new voice or instrument, to crescendos and to sudden changes in loudness.

In 2018 an experiment tested this directly: when the passages that usually produced chills were removed, chills dropped significantly.

Musicologist David Huron proposed a suggestive, still theoretical explanation: an unexpected turn would briefly trigger an alarm reaction, something like being startled, which the brain immediately reinterprets as safe. The contrast between alarm and calm would amplify the pleasure.

Sadness comes with nuances. In 1995, neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp found that melancholy music produced more chills than cheerful music, and proposed that it tapped into ancient circuits of separation and loss. Later studies suggest something more mixed: songs that give chills are often perceived as happy and sad at the same time.

That blend recalls what psychology says about basic emotions: the body’s reaction is not a simple reflection of the feeling but part of how we build it.

Those who feel nothing

Not getting chills does not mean not enjoying music. But there is a more pronounced phenomenon: specific musical anhedonia.

In 2014, the team of Ernest Mas-Herrero and Josep Marco-Pallarés in Barcelona described healthy people, with no depression or hearing problems, for whom music produces no pleasure, even though other rewards, such as winning money, do. The researchers estimate it could affect between 3% and 5% of the population.

At the other end, a 2016 study by Matthew Sachs, Psyche Loui and colleagues compared ten people who get chills with ten who do not, and found more white matter connections between auditory areas and emotional regions in the first group. It is a suggestive finding, but with only twenty people it does not justify talk of “special brains.”

What chills say about how we feel

Frisson is a small laboratory for emotional intelligence: it shows that an intense emotion can be born of expectation, surprise and engagement, not only of the content of what we hear.

It also helps explain why certain collective moments make us shiver, like an anthem in a stadium or a World Cup final: shared anticipation, an awaited outcome and, suddenly, the resolution.

Getting chills from music does not make you more sensitive, and not getting them does not make you less so. What it does seem to reflect is a way of listening: attentive, curious, open to being surprised. And perhaps that is why it is linked to openness: because for something to make you shiver, you first have to be expecting something from it.

Sources

• Goldstein, A. (1980). Thrills in response to music and other stimuli. Physiological Psychology, 8(1), 126-129.
• Sloboda, J. A. (1991). Music structure and emotional response: Some empirical findings. Psychology of Music, 19(2), 110-120.
• Nusbaum, E. C. and Silvia, P. J. (2011). Shivers and timbres: Personality and the experience of chills from music. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2(2), 199-204.
• Colver, M. C. and El-Alayli, A. (2016). Getting aesthetic chills from music: The connection between openness to experience and frisson. Psychology of Music, 44(3).
• McCrae, R. R. (2007). Aesthetic chills as a universal marker of openness to experience. Motivation and Emotion, 31, 5-11.
• Wassiliwizky, E., Koelsch, S., Wagner, V., Jacobsen, T. and Menninghaus, W. (2017). The emotional power of poetry: neural circuitry, psychophysiology and compositional principles. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(8), 1229-1240.
• Bignardi, G., Chamberlain, R., Kevenaar, S. T., Tamimy, Z. and Boomsma, D. I. (2022). On the etiology of aesthetic chills: a behavioral genetic study. Scientific Reports, 12.
• Blood, A. J. and Zatorre, R. J. (2001). Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(20), 11818-11823.
• Salimpoor, V. N., Benovoy, M., Larcher, K., Dagher, A. and Zatorre, R. J. (2011). Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music. Nature Neuroscience, 14(2), 257-262.
• Ferreri, L., Mas-Herrero, E., Zatorre, R. J., et al. (2019). Dopamine modulates the reward experiences elicited by music. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(9).
• Bannister, S. and Eerola, T. (2018). Suppressing the chills: Effects of musical manipulation on the chills response. Frontiers in Psychology, 9.
• Huron, D. (2006). Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. MIT Press.
• Panksepp, J. (1995). The emotional sources of “chills” induced by music. Music Perception, 13(2), 171-207.
• Mas-Herrero, E., Zatorre, R. J., Rodriguez-Fornells, A. and Marco-Pallarés, J. (2014). Dissociation between musical and monetary reward responses in specific musical anhedonia. Current Biology, 24(6).
• Sachs, M. E., Ellis, R. J., Schlaug, G. and Loui, P. (2016). Brain connectivity reflects human aesthetic responses to music. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 11(6).