Why does music give some people chills?

The chills reaction to music, technically called frisson, involves a real physiological response: goosebumps, a shiver, sometimes tearing, driven by the sympathetic nervous system. Brain imaging research from McGill found dopamine release in reward regions during peak emotional moments in music, with anticipatory release in one area before the climactic moment and peak release in another during it, which is the same circuitry involved in food, sex, and drugs. That finding did a lot to establish that the response is a genuine reward event rather than a metaphor.

What triggers it is largely about expectation. Musical moments that produce chills tend to involve violated then resolved expectations, an unexpected harmonic turn, a sudden dynamic swell, an entering voice, a delayed resolution, which is why the effect depends partly on knowing a musical idiom well enough to have expectations to violate. Not everyone experiences frisson, and studies associate it with higher scores on the personality trait openness to experience, and specifically with the tendency to engage imaginatively and absorb deeply in aesthetic experience. Structural brain differences in the connections between auditory and emotional processing regions have also been reported in people who get chills frequently. It is not limited to music either, since some people report the same response to poetry, film scenes, or moving speech.