Imagine two people listening to a song they both know. The accompaniment drops away, leaving just enough space for them to anticipate the singer’s return. When the voice comes back, one feels a shiver across the shoulders. The other keeps listening, enjoying the way the voice comes in, without a shiver at all. Why does music give you goosebumps when the part that moves you is the part you saw coming?
Knowing a recording lets you anticipate the moment before it arrives. That anticipation can be part of the pleasure. The shiver you feel and the bumps you might see on your skin, though, are two different things to measure. [1,2]
Why does familiar music still give you goosebumps?
In a brain imaging study led by Valorie Salimpoor, listeners brought instrumental music that reliably gave them chills. The researchers screened for people who could feel a chill at the same point on repeated listens. They also excluded selections tied to a personal memory, helping them study the response without relying on a remembered event. The final group had eight people. [1]
One of the study’s comparisons is easy to imagine: a piece that gave one participant chills could serve as relatively neutral music for another. For the first listener, the passage was familiar enough to mark a particular instant. The other could hear the same recording without waiting for that instant in the same way. The study shows that chills can recur at a known point. Its participants were chosen because this happened to them, so it cannot tell us how often repetition keeps a passage moving for everyone else. [1]
A first listen can work differently. In a live flute study, notes that were less predictable according to a model of musical expectations were associated with changes in listeners’ arousal. That study measured reactions such as skin conductance and ratings of arousal, rather than establishing that the unexpected notes produced chills. In another listening study, changes in volume and the entrance of a voice were often linked with chills. Those associations help explain why researchers look closely at particular moments in a piece, but they do not give us a recipe that works across listeners. [3,4]
What dopamine tells us about the moment before a chill
So why does music give you goosebumps at the instant you were waiting for? Salimpoor’s team used two kinds of brain imaging to look at what happens before and during the peak. PET scans produced evidence consistent with dopamine release during pleasurable listening. Separate fMRI scans showed greater involvement of the caudate, part of the brain’s reward circuitry, in the period before a reported peak, and of the nucleus accumbens around the peak itself. The fMRI scans did not measure dopamine release from second to second. The distinction matters because the evidence for dopamine and the evidence about timing came from different measurements. [1]
A later experiment tested dopamine’s role more directly. Across three sessions, 27 participants received a drug that increases dopamine availability, a drug that blocks certain dopamine receptors, and a placebo. The drugs shifted reported musical pleasure in opposite directions. Among those who reported chills, they also changed how much time listeners spent reporting them. This supports a role for dopamine in musical reward. It leaves open why a particular note affects one listener more than another, and whether the felt shiver produces a visible change in the skin. [5]
When does music give you goosebumps you can see?
A musical chill, often called frisson, is the sensation of a shiver or tingle during listening. Goosebumps, or piloerection, are a visible change: tiny muscles at the hair follicles contract, lifting the hairs and dimpling the skin. A listener can report a chill even when a camera detects no bumps at the spot it is recording. [2]
Mathias Benedek and Christian Kaernbach attached a small camera to participants’ forearms while they listened to music and audio from films. When the camera detected goosebumps, the researchers also found changes in skin conductance and breathing depth compared with matched trials without visible bumps. The camera could register a change that a listener’s button press could not verify. It could also miss what was happening elsewhere on the body. [2]
Tears add another wrinkle. In a separate music study, reported chills were associated with increased skin conductance. Reported tear responses, which included a lump in the throat, were associated with slower breathing alongside a faster heartbeat. Participants reported pleasure with both responses. The findings describe different patterns in that experiment; they do not mean a listener has to experience one reaction at a time. [6]
Why the same music gives one listener goosebumps
Go back to the two listeners. Both recognize the song, but one may have spent years playing that recording and learned to wait for the singer’s return. For the other, a different passage might matter more. Familiar music can also bring up personal memories, though studies of those memories do not tell us whether a recollection caused a particular chill. The listeners in Salimpoor’s study could get chills even from selections they did not associate with a specific event. [1,7]
The next time a familiar passage makes you shiver, replay the seconds before it. Listen for the point when you start waiting for the voice to return. That buildup is part of the answer to “Why does music give you goosebumps right there?” And if the tune comes back to you hours later, with no music playing, that raises a different question: why songs get stuck in your head.
References
- Salimpoor VN, Benovoy M, Larcher K, Dagher A, Zatorre RJ. Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music. Nature Neuroscience. 2011;14:257–262. doi:10.1038/nn.2726
- Benedek M, Kaernbach C. Physiological correlates and emotional specificity of human piloerection. Biological Psychology. 2011;86:320–329. doi:10.1016/j.biopsycho.2010.12.012
- Egermann H, Pearce MT, Wiggins GA, McAdams S. Probabilistic models of expectation violation predict psychophysiological emotional responses to live concert music. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience. 2013;13:533–553. doi:10.3758/s13415-013-0161-y
- Grewe O, Nagel F, Kopiez R, Altenmüller E. Listening to music as a re-creative process: Physiological, psychological, and psychoacoustical correlates of chills and strong emotions. Music Perception. 2007;24:297–314. doi:10.1525/mp.2007.24.3.297
- Ferreri L, Mas-Herrero E, Zatorre RJ, et al. Dopamine modulates the reward experiences elicited by music. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2019;116:3793–3798. doi:10.1073/pnas.1811878116
- Mori K, Iwanaga M. Two types of peak emotional responses to music: The psychophysiology of chills and tears. Scientific Reports. 2017;7:46063. doi:10.1038/srep46063
- Janata P. The neural architecture of music-evoked autobiographical memories. Cerebral Cortex. 2009;19:2579–2594. doi:10.1093/cercor/bhp008
- Darwin C. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. 2nd ed. London: John Murray; 1890. Archival transcription of the opening quotation.
