Spine Tinglers

In a 2009 study of responses to music, neuroscientist Valorie Salimpoor and her colleagues asked participants to bring in 3 to 5 pieces of “intensely pleasurable instrumental music to which they experience chills.” Then they measured their physiological response as they listened. They found that the “chills” effect is real — when the subjects reported that their pleasure at the music was highest, so was their sympathetic nervous system activity, a measure of emotional arousal.

One byproduct of the study is a list of more than 200 chills-inducing moments in music of various genres, with precise timestamps of the crucial points:

Composer/Artist Title Chills
Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 17 in D Minor (“The Tempest”) 5:33
Mahler Symphony No. 1 – Movement 4 5:42, 9:57, 15:15
Charles Mingus Fables of Faubus 0:20, 7:10
Stan Getz Round Midnight 1:26
Pink Floyd Shine on You Crazy Diamond 5:00
Phish You Enjoy Myself 10:50
Cannonball Adderley One for Daddy-O 0:40
Los Angeles Guitar Quartet Congan 2:09
Crowfoot Larks in May 0:10, 2:00
Howard Shore The Breaking of the Fellowship (film score) 0:10, 0:55
Dave Matthews Band #34 1:40
The Dissociatives Paris Circa 2007 Slash 08 1:30
Brad Mehldau Knives Out 4:45, 7:25
Explosions in the Sky First Breath After Coma 2:25, 3:30, 8:10

These won’t work for everyone — music tastes are notoriously idiosyncratic — but it’s interesting to see what people find moving. The full list is here (Table_S1). (Note too that the timestamps relate to a particular recording, so consider them approximate in e.g. classical music.)

(Valorie N. Salimpoor, et al., “The Rewarding Aspects of Music Listening Are Related to Degree of Emotional Arousal,” PloS One 4:10 [2009], e7487.)