Why Music Gives Us Goosebumps: The Psychology and Neuroscience of Emotional Chills

When music sends shivers down your spine

A familiar recording reaches the moment you have been waiting for. A voice rises above the instruments, the harmony opens out, and a shiver travels across your shoulders. For a few seconds, the music feels physically present: your skin prickles, your throat tightens, or tears arrive before you have decided what you feel.

How can patterns of sound produce an experience like this? Research on musical chills brings together perception, anticipation, emotion, memory and bodily responses. Its appeal is that an unusually intense experience can be studied while someone listens. Its difficulty is that the same recording may overwhelm one listener and leave another unmoved. Understanding that difference requires more than identifying a dramatic chord or a single brain region.

What exactly are musical chills?

Music-evoked chills are brief experiences commonly described as shivers, tingling or waves of sensation. Frisson is another term often used for these emotionally intense moments. Piloerection is more specific: small muscles attached to hair follicles contract, producing raised hairs and visible goosebumps. The subjective experience and the visible response can overlap, but they are not interchangeable (de Fleurian & Pearce, 2021).

Researchers therefore measure different things. A button press records when someone notices a chill; optical skin recording can detect piloerection; electrodes measure skin conductance, which changes with sweat-gland activity. In an experiment using music and film audio, objectively recorded piloerection accompanied changes in skin conductance and breathing (Benedek & Kaernbach, 2011). Those measurements describe related aspects of an experience rather than providing equivalent tests of it.

A rise in skin conductance also occurs during many other forms of arousal. It cannot, by itself, establish that somebody felt pleasure or had goosebumps. McPhetres and Zickfeld's (2022) systematic review found evidence linking emotional piloerection with sympathetic activation, while highlighting gaps in other physiological measures. Definitions matter too: an exciting shiver, an uneasy chill and being deeply moved need not feel alike. Not every chill is pleasurable.

Imagine two listeners marking the same passage. One notices a tingling scalp without visible skin changes; the other develops goosebumps but describes the sensation as unsettling. Counting both button presses is useful, yet conceals their differences. A stronger study combines a clear definition, time-stamped reports, observation of the skin and separate ratings of pleasantness. Agreement between measures strengthens interpretation; disagreement can reveal that the measures captured different parts of the response.

The neuroscience of musical pleasure

Sound meets valuation

Auditory processing makes patterns in pitch, rhythm and timbre available for interpretation. Their emotional value emerges through interactions with other systems. In an early positron emission tomography study, Blood and Zatorre (2001) linked increasing chill intensity with changes in cerebral blood flow across regions implicated in reward, emotion and arousal, including the ventral striatum and midbrain. This was evidence of a distributed response, rather than a dedicated centre for musical goosebumps.

The nucleus accumbens, within the ventral striatum, has received particular attention. Salimpoor and colleagues (2013) used unfamiliar music and an auction task: activity and functional connections involving this region predicted how much listeners would spend on recordings. The findings linked auditory analysis with valuation. Because willingness to pay and chills are different outcomes, they inform an account of musical reward without being identical demonstrations of frisson.

What dopamine evidence actually shows

Salimpoor and colleagues (2011) used a dopamine-sensitive PET method, alongside functional MRI, to investigate intensely pleasurable listening. Their results supported dopamine release in the striatum during this experience. Ordinary functional MRI measures blood-oxygen changes; it does not directly measure dopamine. That distinction prevents a colourful brain image from becoming a chemical explanation it cannot establish.

A pharmacological experiment offered stronger evidence of a causal contribution. In a double-blind, within-person study, Ferreri and colleagues (2019) compared levodopa, risperidone and placebo. The drugs produced opposing changes in musical pleasure and motivation. This supports dopamine's involvement under those conditions. It does not show that dopamine alone produces musical emotion, or that every emotional response to every song has been shown to involve dopamine release.

The power of anticipation

Music unfolds through time, allowing listeners to develop expectations. A repeated rhythm suggests when the next beat will arrive. A phrase seems to approach a resting point, then continues. A quiet passage gives a later entrance its force. Familiarity with a musical style helps shape these predictions, even when a listener cannot explain its rules.

Cheung and colleagues (2019) quantified uncertainty and surprise in chord sequences. Pleasure depended on their interaction: an unexpected chord could be enjoyable when expectations were clear, while a predictable chord could be enjoyable after uncertainty. Greater surprise did not simply mean greater pleasure. Their imaging results also involved several regions, challenging a straightforward equation between surprise and nucleus accumbens activity.

In another experiment, participants learned choices associated with preferred musical endings. Gold and colleagues (2019) found nucleus accumbens activity related to modelled reward prediction errors: differences between expected and obtained outcomes. This supports a connection between musical reward and learning, but the task did not reproduce every feature of spontaneous listening.

Anticipation is therefore one important route into emotion. Juslin and Västfjäll's (2008) theoretical framework also considers processes such as emotional contagion, imagery and learned associations. A crescendo, a harmonic change or a sudden silence may matter through different combinations of mechanisms. Their presence is not a formula for producing a chill.

Consider hearing a well-known live arrangement in which the singer delays a familiar line. You know the song, but the timing of this performance remains uncertain. Recognising what usually happens and responding to how it happens now are compatible. This example illustrates why explaining musical emotion through expectation need not imply that only unfamiliar music can move us. A useful theory must accommodate enjoyment when an event is surprising, when it is expected, and when its arrival has acquired personal significance.

Why the emotional peak matters

Sometimes pleasure begins before the powerful moment arrives. Knowing that a singer is about to enter can become part of the enjoyment. The next few seconds acquire significance because of both the passage already heard and the event being anticipated.

Salimpoor and colleagues' (2011) combined imaging work distinguished phases of this response. Functional MRI activity was relatively more associated with the caudate during anticipation and the nucleus accumbens during peak emotion, in regions also implicated by their PET findings. The timing distinction came from combining methods; it should not be described as a second-by-second PET film of dopamine release.

The regional patterns overlap, and the participants were selected for intense responses. The findings suggest distinguishable phases in one experimental setting; their application to other listeners remains an open question.

Why certain songs affect us personally

A recording can carry a place, a relationship or a period of life. The first notes of a song heard during an important journey may have significance that its composer could never have specified. The same arrangement reaches another listener without that history.

Janata's (2009) imaging research linked music-evoked autobiographical remembering with activity in a wider memory network, including medial prefrontal regions. Familiarity also matters independently of any particular remembered event: Pereira and colleagues (2011) found stronger responses in several emotion- and reward-related regions for familiar than unfamiliar music. Neither finding establishes that remembering a personal event is necessary for chills.

It helps to keep several experiences separate. Familiarity means recognising something; nostalgia involves a feeling towards the past; autobiographical association concerns one's own history; enjoyment and chills describe other aspects of the response. They can occur together or separately. Our article on reconstructive memory explores remembering in more detail. Here, the relevant point is how a listener's history gives sound personal value.

This creates a practical research challenge. Asking participants to bring their most powerful music increases the chance of observing an intense response, but also brings together preference, familiarity and personal association. A comparison recording may differ on all three. Studies using unfamiliar music offer a complementary approach, while losing some of the personal significance that makes everyday listening distinctive. Neither design answers every question; the conclusions depend on what the comparison actually controls.

Why sad music can sometimes feel good

Calling a piece sad describes its perceived expression, but does not fully specify what the listener feels. Someone can recognise grief in a voice while experiencing admiration, tenderness or comfort. Another person may feel sadness directly, alongside appreciation of the performance. A third may find the same recording unpleasant.

Eerola and colleagues' (2018) integrative review examined explanations ranging across biological, psychological and cultural levels. Proposed routes to enjoyment include aesthetic appreciation, feelings of connection, nostalgia and being moved. These accounts need not be mutually exclusive, and their evidential support varies. They should not become a blanket claim that sadness is secretly pleasurable.

In laboratory research, Mori and Iwanaga (2017) distinguished self-reported chills from tear responses. Both could accompany pleasure, but their physiological profiles differed: chills were associated with greater electrodermal arousal, while tears involved slower breathing alongside other activation. Tears were also associated with sadder, calmer musical expression. The study illustrates why goosebumps, tears and emotional intensity should not be collapsed into one reaction.

There is consequently no contradiction in valuing a song that brings sadness. The overall experience may contain beauty, connection or meaning as well. Equally, distressing listening remains distressing for some people; an explanation of mixed emotion should leave room for that experience.

Why some people experience chills more often

Personality and musical engagement

Nusbaum and Silvia (2011) found that openness to experience was associated with more frequent music-related chills. Musical engagement, including the importance of music in people's lives, helped account statistically for that association. Openness describes a broad tendency towards curiosity and engagement with experience; it is not a measure of emotional superiority.

Because these were questionnaire associations, they cannot establish that becoming more open causes chills. Listening habits, opportunities, preferences and ways of describing sensations may influence the pattern. Someone who rarely has goosebumps can still listen attentively and find music profoundly meaningful.

What the 2026 genetics study found

Bignardi and colleagues (2026) examined reports of chills in 15,606 genotyped participants from the Netherlands. Common measured DNA variation accounted for about 7% of variation in reported musical chills; a broader estimate incorporating familial relatedness was about 29%. These are different estimates, not interchangeable statements that a person's response is “30% genetic”.

The authors discuss several possible contributors to the gap, including unmeasured genetic influences and environmental similarities between relatives. Their results also indicated partly shared genetic influences across musical and other aesthetic chills. The study concerns differences within a sampled population, rather than an individual's destiny. Our discussion of genetics, environment and individuality explains why those levels of explanation matter.

Is musical pleasure universal?

Evidence of widespread musical activity does not establish identical emotional experiences everywhere. McDermott and colleagues (2016) found that Tsimane' participants with limited exposure to Western music did not show the same preference for consonance over dissonance as more Western-exposed comparison groups. This was a study of musical perception and preference, not a direct cross-cultural test of chills. Its relevance is that apparently obvious musical values can depend on experience.

Cowen and colleagues (2020) identified substantial similarities in music-related feelings reported by US and Chinese listeners, alongside cultural differences. Two national samples still cannot stand for every musical tradition. Likewise, findings from Western students or volunteers already interested in chills require caution when applied to the wider population.

Individual variation can be striking even within a culture. Mas-Herrero and colleagues (2014) identified people with low musical pleasure despite preserved musical perception and responses to monetary reward. Specific musical anhedonia is distinct from simply lacking goosebumps. Neither the existence nor the absence of chills should be used as a complete measure of someone's capacity for musical enjoyment.

Comparisons also depend on the questions researchers ask. Translated words for being moved or feeling a chill may not carry exactly the same associations. Short recordings selected by researchers can sample only part of a musical tradition, and listening alone through equipment differs from participating in a shared performance. These are reasons to widen research settings and clarify measures. They do not mean that findings obtained in a laboratory have no value.

What recent research adds

Recent work broadens both the methods and the questions. Mori (2022) analysed acoustic and lyrical features in music selected by Japanese participants. Computational models distinguished aspects of chills and tears, with different relationships to rhythm, harmony and lyrics. Prediction from patterns in a dataset, however, does not demonstrate that changing one feature will cause a response in a new listener.

Schoeller and colleagues' (2024) neurobiological perspective places bodily feedback and predictive processing within an account of aesthetic chills. It raises questions about how anticipated and sensed bodily changes contribute to feeling. This is a theoretical synthesis, rather than proof of one settled mechanism. It connects with the broader question explored in our article on interoception and internal signals.

Bannister and Payne's (2025) survey extended attention to performing music. Musicians described chills involving musical features, personal associations and interpersonal connections. Retrospective accounts reveal experiences worth investigating; they cannot isolate which factor caused them. Together, these developments suggest that an adequate explanation must connect musical events, bodily responses and the listener's situation, while continuing to measure them separately.

The remaining uncertainty is partly about sequence. Does a sensed bodily change intensify the emotion, or does rising emotion produce the sensation? Could both processes reinforce each other? Simultaneous changes alone cannot decide between these possibilities. Studies that alter a proposed cause while measuring its consequences can test them more directly. Reviews help identify where findings converge, but combining studies with different definitions cannot automatically resolve what their measurements mean.

Can music reliably produce goosebumps?

Experiments move beyond musical recipes

Manipulation studies provide a useful test. Bannister and Eerola (2018) removed previously identified chill-eliciting sections from three pieces. Chills became less frequent, supporting the importance of those passages in context. Because removing a passage changes several musical properties together, the experiment could not identify one universally effective ingredient.

Bannister (2020) then manipulated loudness and spectral brightness, a property related to the distribution of sound energy across frequencies. Increasing loudness increased chills for a crescendo-based piece, while increasing brightness reduced them; the same effects did not appear in the comparison piece. The result challenges the idea that making any recording louder or brighter will reliably intensify emotion.

Personalisation is promising, with limits

Kondoh and colleagues (2026) combined acoustic models with in-ear electroencephalography, which records electrical activity, to select personalised playlists. Their brain-updated pleasure-enhancing condition produced more reported chills than the brain-updated pleasure-reducing condition. Crucially, chill counts did not significantly differ between the enhancement conditions with and without brain updates. This supports further investigation without establishing that brain feedback adds a reliable advantage over the music-based approach.

For an ordinary listener, the implication is modest. Different recordings and situations may offer different possibilities, but a playlist cannot promise a bodily response. Noticing when a passage feels moving can be an interesting personal observation. Failing to produce goosebumps on demand says little about the value of the listening experience.

When sound becomes emotion

Musical chills offer a vivid glimpse of perception becoming personally significant. A pattern is heard, expectations develop, memories or associations become available, and bodily changes enter the experience. Research can examine these relationships through reports, physiological recordings, imaging and carefully designed experiments. No single measure captures the whole event.

The familiar recording will end, and another listener may never understand why that particular moment mattered. Its power lies partly in the relationship between the music and the person hearing it. Sound acquires meaning through what we have learned, what we anticipate and what we bring to the moment. Sometimes that meeting becomes visible on the skin. Sometimes its significance is quieter.

Written by Arkadiusz Dawidowicz · Music Psychology / Affective Neuroscience. Sources checked 6 November 2026.

References

Bannister, S. (2020). A vigilance explanation of musical chills? Effects of loudness and brightness manipulations. Music & Science, 3. https://doi.org/10.1177/2059204320915654

Bannister, S., & Eerola, T. (2018). Suppressing the chills: Effects of musical manipulation on the chills response. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, Article 2046. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02046

Bannister, S., & Payne, E. (2025). A survey of musical chills experiences while performing music. Psychology of Music. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/03057356251383805

Benedek, M., & Kaernbach, C. (2011). Physiological correlates and emotional specificity of human piloerection. Biological Psychology, 86(3), 320–329. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsycho.2010.12.012

Bignardi, G., Admiraal, D., Eising, E., & Fisher, S. E. (2026). Genetic underpinnings of chills from art and music. PLOS Genetics, 22(2), Article e1012002. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pgen.1012002

Blood, A. J., & 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 of the United States of America, 98(20), 11818–11823. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.191355898

Cheung, V. K. M., Harrison, P. M. C., Meyer, L., Pearce, M. T., Haynes, J.-D., & Koelsch, S. (2019). Uncertainty and surprise jointly predict musical pleasure and amygdala, hippocampus, and auditory cortex activity. Current Biology, 29(23), 4084–4092.e4. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.09.067

Cowen, A. S., Fang, X., Sauter, D., & Keltner, D. (2020). What music makes us feel: At least 13 dimensions organize subjective experiences associated with music across different cultures. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 117(4), 1924–1934. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1910704117

de Fleurian, R., & Pearce, M. T. (2021). Chills in music: A systematic review. Psychological Bulletin, 147(9), 890–920. https://doi.org/10.1037/bul0000341

Eerola, T., Vuoskoski, J. K., Peltola, H.-R., Putkinen, V., & Schäfer, K. (2018). An integrative review of the enjoyment of sadness associated with music. Physics of Life Reviews, 25, 100–121. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.plrev.2017.11.016

Ferreri, L., Mas-Herrero, E., Zatorre, R. J., Ripollés, P., Gomez-Andres, A., Alicart, H., Olivé, G., Marco-Pallarés, J., Antonijoan, R. M., Valle, M., Riba, J., & Rodriguez-Fornells, A. (2019). Dopamine modulates the reward experiences elicited by music. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 116(9), 3793–3798. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1811878116

Gold, B. P., Mas-Herrero, E., Zeighami, Y., Benovoy, M., Dagher, A., & Zatorre, R. J. (2019). Musical reward prediction errors engage the nucleus accumbens and motivate learning. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 116(8), 3310–3315. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1809855116

Janata, P. (2009). The neural architecture of music-evoked autobiographical memories. Cerebral Cortex, 19(11), 2579–2594. https://doi.org/10.1093/cercor/bhp008

Juslin, P. N., & Västfjäll, D. (2008). Emotional responses to music: The need to consider underlying mechanisms. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31(5), 559–575. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X08005293

Kondoh, S., Etani, T., Sakakibara, Y., Naruse, Y., Imamura, Y., Ibaraki, T., & Fujii, S. (2026). A chill brain-music interface for enhancing music chills with personalized playlists. iScience, 29(1), Article 114508. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.isci.2025.114508

Mas-Herrero, E., Zatorre, R. J., Rodriguez-Fornells, A., & Marco-Pallarés, J. (2014). Dissociation between musical and monetary reward responses in specific musical anhedonia. Current Biology, 24(6), 699–704. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.01.068

McDermott, J. H., Schultz, A. F., Undurraga, E. A., & Godoy, R. A. (2016). Indifference to dissonance in native Amazonians reveals cultural variation in music perception. Nature, 535(7613), 547–550. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature18635

McPhetres, J., & Zickfeld, J. H. (2022). The physiological study of emotional piloerection: A systematic review and guide for future research. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 179, 6–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2022.06.010

Mori, K. (2022). Decoding peak emotional responses to music from computational acoustic and lyrical features. Cognition, 222, Article 105010. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.105010

Mori, K., & Iwanaga, M. (2017). Two types of peak emotional responses to music: The psychophysiology of chills and tears. Scientific Reports, 7, Article 46063. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep46063

Nusbaum, E. C., & Silvia, P. J. (2011). Shivers and timbres: Personality and the experience of chills from music. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 2(2), 199–204. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550610386810

Pereira, C. S., Teixeira, J., Figueiredo, P., Xavier, J., Castro, S. L., & Brattico, E. (2011). Music and emotions in the brain: Familiarity matters. PLOS ONE, 6(11), Article e27241. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0027241

Salimpoor, V. N., Benovoy, M., Larcher, K., Dagher, A., & Zatorre, R. J. (2011). Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music. Nature Neuroscience, 14(2), 257–262. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2726

Salimpoor, V. N., van den Bosch, I., Kovacevic, N., McIntosh, A. R., Dagher, A., & Zatorre, R. J. (2013). Interactions between the nucleus accumbens and auditory cortices predict music reward value. Science, 340(6129), 216–219. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1231059

Schoeller, F., Jain, A., Pizzagalli, D. A., & Reggente, N. (2024). The neurobiology of aesthetic chills: How bodily sensations shape emotional experiences. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 24(4), 617–630. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13415-024-01168-x