Why do some people get goosebumps from listening to music?
October, 2018
Have you ever been listening to a wonderful piece of music and felt a pleasurable chill run up your spine? Or goosebumps radiate through your shoulders and arms?
A number of different labels have been used to describe this response, including “chills,” “thrills,” and even “skin orgasm.” The more appropriate and scientifically accepted expression appears to be “frisson,” a French term meaning “pleasurable aesthetic chills,” and according to a recent study, differences in personality seem to make certain music listeners more susceptible to this sensation than others.
What causes these chills and thrills in music?
This phenomenon may feel prevalent in emotional songs driven by powerful voices, such as Adele’s “Someone Like You,” or Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.” In a set of questionnaire surveys, Avram Goldstein at Stanford University found music to be the most common frisson-producing stimulus reported among items such as scenes in a movie or play, beauty in nature or art, and sexual activity.
In a physiological study on music’s ability to elicit chill experiences, researchers Martin Guhn, Alfons Hamm, and Marcel Zentner found certain musical instances such as unexpected harmonies, unexpected dynamics, or the unexpected entrance of a new voice (such as a solo) to be causes of frisson. Furthermore, composer and philosopher Leonard Meyer suggested that unexpected musical instances provide emotion for the listener because they violate the musical expectations of the listener and are therefore pleasant surprises.
This is why musical stanzas such as the chorus in Adele’s “Someone Like You” are capable of giving listeners goosebumps. The song’s chorus defies expectations of repetition on its second passage while the singer raises her vocal register, thus producing an episode of frisson.
Testing live frisson episodes
Past studies have established a connection between frisson and the personality trait openness to experience, one of the Big Five personality traits (along with conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism). Those who possess the openness trait generally are intellectually curious, open to emotion, sensitive to beauty, and willing to try new things.
However, the methodologies employed in these studies have relied solely on self-report data, so none of the researchers were able to record live instances of frisson episodes.
Such was the purpose of Mitchell Colver and Amani El-Alayli’s empirical study on the connection between openness to experience and frisson. To examine this relationship, they studied 100 college students at a four-year university in Washington State by administering a Revised NEO Personality Inventory (known as the NEO-PI-R) and then recording participants’ galvanic skin response (GSR) levels during exposure to emotionally powerful music capable of eliciting a frisson response.
The NEO-PI-R examines a person’s Big Five personality traits and the subcategories of each trait, while the GSR is used to measure galvanic skin response, a change in the electrical resistance of people’s skin when they become physiologically aroused.
According to past studies, the most common contributor of music-induced frisson is the unexpected entrance of a new voice, so the researchers settled on five pieces that were found to produce frisson through such instances:
J.S. Bach’s “St. John Passion”
Chopin’s “Piano Concerto No. 1”
Air Supply’s “Making Love Out of Nothing at All”
Vangelis’ “Mythodea: VI”
Hans Zimmer’s “Oogway Ascends”
As participants listened to these pieces, they were asked to report their experiences of frisson by pressing a red button, which created a temporal log of their GSR levels. By comparing these results to the personality test that the participants had completed, Colver and El-Alayli were able to draw unique conclusions about why frisson might occur more often for some listeners than for others.
Personality’s impact on frisson
The results did indeed show that higher overall openness scores were related to more frisson experiences during the listening sessions. While this connection had been established by previous studies, most researchers had concluded that the two subcategories of openness that most likely correlated with frisson were aesthetics and feelings.
However, the results of Colver and El-Alayli’s study indicate that the cognitive components of openness, imagination and intellectual curiosity, are associated with frisson to a greater degree than the emotional subcategories.
These findings demonstrate that listeners who intellectually immerse themselves in music, such as predicting how the music will unfold or experiencing musical imagery (a way of processing music that combines listening with daydreaming), might experience frisson more often and more intensely than those who simply let it play in the background.