Why Music Gives Us the Chills

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Wynton Marsalis. AP Photo

For a willing music audience, the art of drawing emotion from notes is classic.

Composers play with subtle, intricate changes and rates of change to try and elicit emotion. In recent studies, scientists found that people already familiar with the music are more likely to catch a chill at key moments:

  • When a symphony turns from loud to quiet
  • Upon entry of a solo voice or instrument
  • When two singers have contrasting voices

People covered in goose bumps also tend to be driven more by rewards, and less inclined to be thrill- and adventure-seekers, according to research conducted at the Institute for Music Physiology and Musicians’ Medicine in Hanover, Germany.

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"Our results suggest that chills depend very much on our ability to interpret the music," said Oliver Grewe, a biologist and musicologist at the institute. "Music is a recreative activity. Even if it is relaxing to listen to, the listener has to recreate its meaning, the feelings it expresses. It is the listener who gives life to the emotions in music."

The researchers' latest findings are currently being reviewed for journal publication, while their previous research has been published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Music can do more than just give you goose bumps. A melody can:

Listening to your favorite hits can shift your breathing pattern and speed up your heart rate.

Shivers down the spine even show up in brain scans, according to research at McGill University. As chills grow in intensity, bloodflow increases between areas of the brain associated with euphoria-inducing vices like food, sex, and drugs.

In the near future, the German research team plans to further study the central nervous system's reactions to music that gives fans the chills.

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Corey Binns
Corey Binns lives in Northern California and writes about science, health, parenting, and social change. In addition to writing for Live Science, she's contributed to publications including Popular Science, TODAY.com, Scholastic, and the Stanford Social Innovation Review as well as others. She's also produced stories for NPR’s Science Friday and Sundance Channel. She studied biology at Brown University and earned a Master's degree in science journalism from NYU. The Association of Health Care Journalists named her a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Health Journalism Fellow in 2009. She has chased tornadoes and lived to tell the tale.