Whatever your musical taste – we won’t judge! – music has the power to make us respond emotionally and physically, with some listeners able to experience goosebumps or even ‘skin orgasms’ when listening to certain tunes.
Many scientists typically call this frisson (pronounced free-sawn). It means ‘to shiver’ or ‘have chills’ in French – which sounds chic – while some refer to it as music-evoked chills (MECs).
Despite people from all over the world reporting this pleasurable side-effect of listening to music, the relationship between music, pleasure and emotion is not very well understood.
What causes frisson?
No-one really knows for sure, but it could come down to the mood and surprising elements in pieces of music and the listener’s own personality too.
“Musical passages that include unexpected harmonies, sudden changes in volume or the moving entrance of a soloist are particularly common triggers for frisson because they violate listeners’ expectations in a positive way,” according to Mitchell Colver of Utah State University who has researched and written about the phenomenon. A choir or key change may also trigger chills and goosebumps, which is great news for fans of 90s boybands. (Whether the effect is amplified by members rising from a line of matching stools and gesticulating wildly at the key change has sadly not been studied.)
Interestingly, chills experienced in response to music listening have been linked to both happiness and sadness expressed by music, so scientists from Queen Mary University of London investigated by analysing 988 tracks known to make listeners shiver. They found that that tracks which cause chills tended to be sadder, slower, less intense and more instrumental. But just listening to Phoebe Bridgers or Max Richter, for example, doesn’t necessarily guarantee that you’ll feel frisson. It seems that some people just, don’t.
Why do only some people get chills?
Anywhere between 55% and 86% of us get chills listening to music, according to scientific studies. According to one of them, most people feel the chills in the upper spine and back of their neck, with tingling down the shoulders, lower spine and scalp the next most common. In fact, the chill, shudder, tingling or tickling may be accompanied by the feeling of “hair standing on end” or goose bumps on the arms, like a kind of pleasurable duet. And people who experience frisson seem to do so quite regularly.
You may be more likely to feel frisson if you’re really into the music.
Scientists Amani El-Alayli of Eastern Washington University and Mitchell Colver of Utah State University measured the electrical resistance of people’s skin changes while the listened to several pieces of music – including extracts with “thrilling moments” by Bach, Air Supply and Hans Zimmer – and monitored their reactions in real time. They also quizzed them on their personality.
They found that listeners who experienced frisson also scored high for a personality trait called ‘Openness to Experience’. Interestingly, people with this trait usually have good imaginations, appreciate beauty and reflect upon their feelings, so if this sounds like you, it’s possible you get chills frequently.
What’s happening in the brain?
Intriguingly, frisson is a somatic marker like nausea and disgust, where a feeling in the body is associated with an emotion and our body and mind feels the feeling in unison. Scientists think it’s linked to peak emotional experiences and meaningful moments – so you might feel it gazing at a photo that important to you, a particularly beautiful painting, or listening to a song.
One leading theory is that listening to music sometimes activates dopamine release in the brain – a similar pathway associated with reward that is activated with sex, drugs (and perhaps, conveniently) rock and roll). “So you have this sudden rush of dopamine and the idea is that this rush of dopamine is what causes us to have this physiological reaction – goosebumps,” psychologist, Rebbecca Johnson-Osei told the BBC.
Scientists are interested in which parts of the brain ‘light up’ when listening to music that gives people chills. A study found that participants who experienced frisson had more robust connections between the auditory cortex and areas related to emotional processing so they are perhaps almost ‘hard-wired’ to react to Adele’s latest heart-breaking ballad.
Time to chill
While experts are working on revealing the scientific secrets of frisson, it’s possible that musicians have always intuitively used it to make spine-tingling tunes. If you’re not lucky enough to experience chills, help may be on its way. Scientists at MIT are working on a device that can reliably induce frisson in people and recreate the effects of it to boost pleasure and empathy.
But until that gadget comes to a superstore near you, there’s a frisson-sparking Spotify playlist allegedly put together by a music researcher, and a whole lot of music out there to listen to and see if you can feel chills. Even – *key change* – Westlife.
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