Near the end of Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp minor, the theme comes back. The same three heavy notes the piece opened with, except now there are so many notes stacked on top of them that the score can't hold it on two staves. Rachmaninoff writes the return across four, two for each hand. The whole piano is ringing.
I know exactly where that moment lands, and have known it for most of my life. And it still gets me, the hair on my arms lifting as each new chord progression touches different parts of my soul.
That is the strange part. Not that music moves us, but that it moves the body on cue, even when we know what's coming. So what is actually happening?
What frisson is
Frisson is the word for it: the chill, the goosebumps, the tingle that runs up the back of the neck or down the arms when a piece of music hits. Researchers usually call it a music-evoked chill. I wrote about one of those moments, on a dancefloor in Ibiza, in The Shiver You Didn't Ask For.
It lasts a few seconds. That's part of why scientists love it. Most musical emotion is hard to pin down, but a chill has a start and a finish. A listener can press a button when it happens, and you can see it in the body. When Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre at McGill studied it in 2001, the reported chills came with measurable changes in heart rate, breathing, and muscle activity.
Your brain treats it as a reward
That 2001 study was the first to look inside the brain during chills. Ten listeners, each a trained musician, brought in a classical piece that reliably gave them chills. They lay in a PET scanner and listened to their own piece, and to someone else's choice as a comparison.
As the chills got stronger, activity changed in a specific set of regions: the ventral striatum, the midbrain, the amygdala, and parts of the frontal cortex. These are the same areas that respond to food, sex, and drugs. The authors wrote that the finding links music with "biologically relevant, survival-related stimuli."
Ten years later, Valorie Salimpoor and colleagues in the same lab went further. With PET scans, they showed the striatum releases dopamine when people listen to music that gives them chills. Then they used fMRI to see when each part of that system is active, and found something that makes complete sense to anyone who has ever played to a room: two different parts of the reward system, working in sequence. The caudate was more active in the 15 seconds before a chill, a window the researchers picked because that's when the body starts to react. The nucleus accumbens took over at the peak itself.
In 2019, a team led by Laura Ferreri in Barcelona tested whether dopamine actually causes the pleasure, rather than just showing up alongside it. Twenty-seven people listened to music on three separate days: once after a drug that boosts dopamine, once after a drug that blocks it, and once on a placebo. Boosting dopamine increased how much they enjoyed the music and how much they wanted more of it. Blocking it did the opposite.
So the chill is not a metaphor. It's the reward system doing what it does for anything it decides is worth having.
It's about the waiting
The detail from the Salimpoor study that stays with me is the split. There is a reward for the moment, and a separate reward for the wait.
David Huron, a music theorist and cognitive scientist, built a whole book around this idea, Sweet Anticipation. His argument is that listening is constant prediction. Your brain is always guessing what comes next. One of his explanations for frisson is that a sudden, big, unexpected musical event sets off a fast alarm response in the body, the same one that would fire if something startled you. A moment later, a slower part of the brain checks the situation and decides you are safe. That contrast, alarm followed by relief, is part of what makes the moment feel so good. It's a theory, not a settled fact, but it fits a lot of what listeners describe.
Other researchers have gone looking for the exact musical moments that do it. In 1991, the psychologist John Sloboda asked listeners to point to specific passages that gave them a physical reaction, then analyzed what was happening in the score. Shivers tended to cluster around a new or unexpected harmony. A 2007 study by Oliver Grewe and colleagues in Germany found that moments like the first entrance of a solo voice or choir, or the start of a new section, reliably shifted how listeners felt and how their bodies reacted.
Which brings me back to the Rachmaninoff. Nothing about that return is a surprise. You can feel it coming for bars. What changes is the size of it. The prediction comes true, and then it overshoots. Dance music runs on the same trick. Everyone on the floor knows the drop is coming, to the beat. The build is the anticipation, and the release is the peak. I wrote about what that does to a crowd in Why the Dancefloor Dissolves You.
Why sad songs do it more
You might expect the happiest, most euphoric music to give the most chills. The research says otherwise. In 1995, the neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp found that chills tracked how sad a piece sounded much more closely than how happy it sounded. He proposed that chills borrow from the same circuitry the brain uses for social loss, the ache of separation. Not everyone agrees with that explanation, and later researchers have challenged it. But the link between sadness and chills keeps showing up.
Why some people get chills and others don't
Not everyone gets them. In a 2016 study, Matthew Sachs, Psyche Loui and colleagues compared people who regularly get chills from music with people who rarely do. The chills group had stronger connections in the brain's white matter between the areas that process sound and areas involved in emotion and social processing, including the insula and the medial prefrontal cortex.
Personality seems to matter too. A 2016 study by Mitchell Colver and Amani El-Alayli linked chills to openness to experience, one of the big five personality traits, and especially to the more mental side of it: listeners who imagine and predict where the music is going, rather than letting it wash over them.
What the science can't tell you
All of this explains how the chill happens. None of it explains which song will do it to you.
Look again at that first study. Each listener's chill piece was used as the comparison for someone else, precisely because it did nothing special for them. The same recording, a reward signal in one brain and background music in the next.
In 2021, Rémi de Fleurian and Marcus Pearce reviewed four decades of research on music chills. Along with their model of what causes them, they published a list of the pieces that had given people chills across all those studies. It is long, and it is all over the place.
That is the part I find most interesting. The mechanism is shared. The trigger is personal. The song that does it to you was shaped by when you first heard it, what you were listening for, and what you were carrying at the time. I've written before about how the song that knows you is less a favorite than a fingerprint.
So the science can tell you why your arms light up. It can't tell you which song lights them up. Only you know that one.
Sources
Blood, A. J. and Zatorre, R. J. (2001). Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion. PNAS 98(20). pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.191355898
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. doi.org/10.1038/nn.2726
Ferreri, L. et al. (2019). Dopamine modulates the reward experiences elicited by music. PNAS 116(9). doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1811878116
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. doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsw009
Huron, D. (2006). Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation. MIT Press.
Sloboda, J. A. (1991). Music structure and emotional response: some empirical findings. Psychology of Music 19(2). doi.org/10.1177/0305735691192002
Grewe, O., Nagel, F., Kopiez, R. and Altenmüller, E. (2007). Emotions over time. Emotion 7(4).
Panksepp, J. (1995). The emotional sources of "chills" induced by music. Music Perception.
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). doi.org/10.1177/0305735615572358
de Fleurian, R. and Pearce, M. T. (2021). Chills in music: A systematic review. Psychological Bulletin 147(9). doi.org/10.1037/bul0000341
Prelude in C-sharp minor (Rachmaninoff), Wikipedia, for the four-stave reprise.