Does music give you chills?
Turn up the sound or put on headphones. While listening, press the button at each chill: goosebumps, a tingle at the back of your neck.
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Try the experiment: your result will appear here, next to what most people do.
What just happened (read it after the experiment)
What most people do: Chills don’t come with every listening, or to everyone; they cluster around a few moments in the music.
At 21 seconds, after the turmoil of the rapids and a brief ebb, the whole orchestra takes up the river’s theme again, in major, fortissimo. It is the kind of moment when your skin prickles.
Chills don’t fall at random: they cluster around a few moments, a sudden rise in volume, the entry of new instruments, the return of a theme, an unexpected harmony. At the moment of the chills, the brain releases dopamine; a first release even comes a few seconds earlier, when it senses the passage coming.
Smetana wrote The Moldau in the fall of 1874, having gone completely deaf a few weeks earlier. He only ever heard it in his mind.
More experiments
Sources
- Oliver Grewe et al., Music Perception, 2007; Martin Guhn, Alfons Hamm and Marcel Zentner, Music Perception, 2007.
- Valorie Salimpoor et al., “Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music,” Nature Neuroscience, 2011.