Reading: Matching Features: Question 6

Musical Chills: Four Explanations for a Puzzling Reflex

About half of all listeners occasionally feel a sudden wave of goosebumps or a shiver down the spine while listening to a particular passage of music, a sensation researchers call frisson. The feeling rarely lasts more than a few seconds and cannot reliably be summoned on demand, which has made it a difficult phenomenon to study. Four researchers have proposed strikingly different accounts of why it occurs.

Dr Elena Marsh argues that frisson is triggered when a piece of music builds a strong expectation about how a melody will resolve, then breaks that expectation in a controlled way. Analysing waveforms against the self-reported chill timestamps of 84 volunteers, she found a sudden departure from the expected harmony occurred immediately before roughly seventy percent of reported chills. Her model also predicts repeated listening should gradually blunt the effect, since a surprise heard often enough stops being a surprise.

Professor Tobias Lindqvist instead traces the sensation to an inherited startle reflex. He notes the acoustic features most reliably associated with chills (a sudden swell in volume, or a solo voice breaking into a high register) closely resemble the alarm calls many species use to signal danger. In his view, frisson is a vestigial version of the reflex that once raised an animal's fur to make it appear larger to a threat.

Dr Priya Nandakumar has focused instead on the social context in which music is heard. Measuring oxytocin in saliva samples before and after listening sessions, she found the sharpest increases among audience members attending a live performance together, compared with participants listening alone through headphones. Chills in the group setting were rated as more intense, their strength tracking how connected participants felt to those around them, leading her to propose the sensation rewards behaviour that strengthens group bonds.

Professor Karel Novak surveyed 500 participants using a standard personality questionnaire and found frisson frequency correlates strongly with a single trait: openness to experience. No comparable relationship emerged for extraversion, conscientiousness or any other trait measured. Novak suggests frisson-proneness may simply be a symptom of a broader tendency toward imaginative absorption, not a response to any specific feature of the music.

Not every researcher is convinced a single mechanism can be isolated. Dr Sofia Bergman has publicly questioned all four accounts, pointing out that frisson studies rely almost entirely on self-report, and that a sensation lasting only a few seconds is notoriously hard for a participant to flag accurately in the moment. A gap she believes none of the four explanations has yet resolved.

List of Researchers A Dr Elena Marsh B Professor Tobias Lindqvist C Dr Priya Nandakumar D Professor Karel Novak E Dr Sofia Bergman

Match each statement with the correct option, A–E. NB You may use any option more than once.

1 Found that a chill was usually preceded by an unexpected shift away from the harmony a listener would have predicted. 2 Linked the sensation to a defensive reflex that once made an animal's fur stand up to appear larger. 3 Reported bigger physiological increases among people who experienced the music in the company of others. 4 Suggested that a person's likelihood of feeling frisson is connected to one particular personality trait. 5 Predicted that returning to the same recording many times should gradually weaken the effect. 6 Argued that the sounds most likely to cause the sensation share acoustic qualities with warning signals used by animals. 7 Found no meaningful relationship between the frequency of chills and how outgoing or sociable a person is.