Why Some People Get Chills From Music, And Others Never Do

A song swells, a voice breaks through, and suddenly goosebumps climb your arms. For some listeners, that full-body shiver is one of music’s greatest pleasures. For others, it never comes at all.

Scientists call the sensation musical frisson, and decades of research suggest it is not triggered by one magic chord or personality trait. Rather, chills seem to emerge when a listener’s expectations, reward system, personal listening history and a song’s carefully timed surprises converge. That said, researchers are still working out why some people feel the response so intensely and others rarely, if ever, do.

How Common Are Music Chills?

The prevalence depends on what researchers count. In a 2021 systematic review, Rémi de Fleurian and Marcus Pearce reported that four laboratory studies found visible goosebumps in 40% to 57% of participants who said they felt chills, while questionnaire studies by Goldstein, Sloboda and Panksepp estimated that 79% to 90% remembered shivers or music-evoked chills.

The review treated 90% as a reasonable upper limit, while cautioning that survey volunteers may not represent the wider population. Goosebumps are also an inconsistent marker, since frisson can instead feel like tingling, a cold shiver or a wave down the neck and spine.

What Happens Before The Musical Peak?

Before the payoff, in at least some reliable chills responders. A small study published by Nature Neuroscience in 2011 used PET scans to indicate dopamine release in the striatum during intensely pleasurable music, while fMRI linked the caudate more strongly with anticipation and the nucleus accumbens with the peak response.

The evidence was suggestive, but specific: participants were selected because they reliably experienced chills, the sample was small, and PET’s relatively poor temporal resolution left uncertainty about the timing of dopamine release.

A double-blind, within-subject study of 27 healthy adults, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2019, found that levodopa increased pleasure, motivation and time reporting chills among chills responders, while risperidone reduced those measures versus placebo. That supports a causal contribution from dopamine without suggesting dopamine alone creates musical emotion.

Prediction also matters. In a 2023 Frontiers in Neuroscience fMRI study, 24 participants rated 50 excerpts most highly when uncertain music produced an expected event or a confident expectation met a surprise. The study measured liking rather than chills, so it cannot show that those combinations invariably cause goosebumps.

Why Do Some People Never Feel Goosebumps?

There is no established structural boundary. After screening 237 people around Boston, researchers selected 10 frequent responders and 10 people who rarely or never experienced chills for a 2016 diffusion-imaging study. Frequent responders had greater white-matter tract volume connecting an auditory-processing region with areas involved in emotional and social processing.

Those findings were preliminary and correlational, involved people at the extremes, and could not establish whether connectivity influences chills or musical engagement changes those pathways.

De Fleurian and Pearce found that openness to experience was the most frequently reported personality correlate, although results were inconsistent and some openness questionnaires include an aesthetic-chills question. Evidence involving age, gender and formal musical training was mixed or largely absent.

A smaller group may have specific musical anhedonia, in which music brings little reward despite intact music perception, emotion recognition and responses to other rewards. That differs from enjoying music without shivering.

What Kind Of Musical Moment Is Most Likely To Work?

A prepared change with emotional consequence. The systematic review repeatedly associated chills with crescendos, climaxes, sudden loudness increases, unexpected harmonies, shifts in texture or tonality, and the entrance of voices or instruments.

Loudness alone is not enough. In a 2020 experiment involving 40 participants, five versions of each of two excerpts showed that increasing loudness produced more chills during a dynamic and textural crescendo, but not during a guitar-solo-centered excerpt.

Familiarity is less dependable, with studies finding more chills, no difference or changing responses after repeated listening.

The practical takeaway is to think less about a universally powerful song and more about the meeting point between musical structure and personal history, where anticipation, surprise and meaning sometimes become strong enough to reach the skin.