Getting goosebumps when listening to music isn’t a sensation that everyone experiences, in fact it seems to be somewhere between 55 and 86% of people. This sensation is called “frisson” (free-sawn) and is a French word meaning “aesthetic chills”.

Studies suggest that frisson is connected to activity in the brain’s reward centers and is most commonly found in people who connect to music emotionally. There are lots of theories about why we experience frisson, and I’ll link some reading/watching material below that I found fun and interesting while working on this post.

♫ Learn About Frisson/Chills:

• Why Does Music Give Us Chills? YouTube video by SciShow

• Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion Study by Anne Blood and Robert J Zatorre

• A Study Found This Song Gave 90% of People "The Chills" Article by Rajeet S for Medium

Build up & dynamics

Something that I notice is a common denominator between the many different songs that give me the chills is the build up.

Many of them start with a sense of slow, quiet, bubbling intensity; there’s this tension that you know can’t be contained for long. This feeling, though, often carries along much longer than you might expect. For me, personally, most of my favorite frisson moments tend to happen later in the song, after I’ve had the chance to get used to that slowly building tension.

Many songs have a bridge or a guitar solo later in the song that euphorically pulls the listener from that built up intensity. It’s this satisfaction and cathartic release that gives us those goosebumps.

One of the most commonly cited examples of a song that gives people goosebumps is Imogen Heap’s Hide and Seek.

This song is full of gorgeous imagery and unusual harmonizer vocals with beautiful harmonies, but what I think it does best is that it forces the listener to wait. The emotion in the Imogen’s voice steadily crescendos through the first verse, but drops off when we hear the following section, which starts with “hide and seek”. The second verse is even bigger and crescendos even more, causing the that soft “hide and seek” to hit us even more.

We then hear her voice climb into notes that are ridiculously high and delicate and tense, which catches us off guard and puts us right at the edge of our seats. And then, of course we hear the part that we all recognize as the catchiest, hook-iest, most “chorus-like” section, which doesn’t come in until nearly 3 minutes into the song.

I think this buildup is insanely effective and gives me chills every time.

Expectations

Some songs, though, manage to hit you with chills much earlier. A song that gives me chills throughout pretty much the entire thing is Nina Simone’s Feeling Good. This song gives you that gorgeous tension and continues to find new ways to build throughout. This song gives me frisson in a couple of different places and I think this is because the buildup is slow and varied, but also surprising.

The first surprise we find in this song is in the very beginning. In most of the music we listen to, there’s some form of musical introduction before the lyrics come in, but here, there’s this a cappella arrangement with lots of little vocal twists and turns. The jazzy, improvised feel of the melody is already working within seconds to challenge your expectations.

The second surprise is when the music comes in at around the 43 second mark. We’ve had just enough time to get used to the a cappella sound, but now, the music hits us right in the gut and our ears begin to adapt to that gorgeous descending bass line. But of course, the moment we get into the groove of this line cliche, we get pulled right out of it when we hear a chord that isn’t in the key on the phrase “it’s a new life for me”

A cool thing that also adds to the unbelievably frisson-worthiness of this song is the fact that western society’s general perception of this music is at odds with the lyrics. The music has a darkness to it, no doubt because of the minor key and use of those jazzy dominant 7th chords. Because of these choices and the repetition of the phrase “you know how I feel”, if you’ve never heard the song before, you might expect it to be about pain or anger or sorrow, so when she sings that she’s feeling good, it plays as yet another surprise and our brains fire in all sorts of awesome ways.

Familiarity

If you’ve seen any of my very, very early videos, it comes as no surprise that I am a massive Harry Potter fan. Hi, I’m a millennial. This book series, which has no author, was a huge part of my childhood, as were the accompanying films. Because of this, whenever I saw one of these movies at a theater or a new trailer came out, and even still, when I sit down to watch them, I have chills within seconds. All these films need do is play that tiny musical opening and I’m immediately hooked.

If you also love Harry Potter or Star Wars or Marvel or any other popular film franchise, you’ve likely experienced this feeling, too. This is the same feeling you get in Pixar’s Coco when you hear Remember Me again at the end of the film or in Rent when spoiler alert Collins sings I’ll Cover You, the song he sang as a duet with Angel earlier in the film, at Angel’s funeral.

So, the thing we’re noticing here is that in these moments, we are reminded of music we’ve heard before, it’s just in a different context. This is super easy to accomplish in musical theater, films, and concept albums because there’s a lot of time for a story and character development to unfold. We can use musical motifs and reprises to give the viewer or listener a new perspective on something they’ve already experienced.

The obvious question here, though, is how do we accomplish a feeling so strongly tied to an emotion or memory when we only have 3 or 4 minutes to do it? How do we make a brand new song familiar to a listener?

One answer is repetition. The more we hear a specific melody or lyric, the better we know it. There are lots of ways to accomplish this, but I think a particularly fun way is to play with song structure. Using a refrain line or chorus that is introduced early in the song, repeats multiple times throughout, and is introduced in different ways as the song goes on, is going to allow your listener to sing or hum along to the melody right away, but will still give them that element of surprise that I mentioned earlier.

Some artists use sampling of other songs in order to create this familiarity. Take Kanye West’s use of Daft Punk’s Harder Better Faster Stronger in his 2007 hit, Stronger. At the time this song came out, Daft Punk was huge and their song had been all over the place for years. By sampling this song, Kanye was able to take a collectively familiar experience and flip it into something unexpected and new.

Funnily enough, Daft Punk’s song also used a sample of a funk song called Cola Bottle Baby by Edwin Birdsong. This song was released in 1979 and wasn’t hugely popular, but the fact that Kanye’s song was a sample of a sample continues to add to this sense of familiarity. This track has generational, decades-long cross appeal and familiarity, which makes for an even more exciting track. The fact that you can go back to Birdsong’s original track and hear that familiar keyboard riff only adds to the excitement of all three songs.

Another way to create familiarity is by opening and closing songs on the same lyric. If you’re able to create a striking or memorable lyric to open your song, try going back to it at the end. This is a technique that stand up comedians often use to craft effective sets. By returning to the first joke of the set at the very end, the audience is given a sense of closure, which adds to a bigger laugh. They’re able to reconnect with their first impressions and relate them to everything they’ve learned and experienced since.

If you want to use this technique in your song, make sure to let that original idea bloom throughout. A great example of this is Say Yes by Elliot Smith. His opening lyric is “I’m in love with the world through the eyes of a girl who’s still around the morning after.” I think this lyric works so effectively because it starts with the sense that we’re hearing a love song. That he’s in love with this person who is still around the next day.

Immediately after this line, though, we’re corrected. They broke up a month ago. So, this opening lyric gave us misleading information and now he has to elaborate. Maybe she used to be around the morning after, but then something happened to make her leave. We start to hear his thought process as he goes through the misery of losing her, but also the hope that they’ll be reunited again or that he’ll fall in love anew.

It’s this hope that makes the line so powerful. He sings “they want you or they don’t. Say yes.” This is when we hear the repetition of our first line, but this time, it doesn’t resolve. In this moment, he’s posing the question “Are you the love who will stay? Will you be around the morning after?” It’s deeply beautiful and emotional and impressively, he manages to pack all of these thoughts and feelings into a song that’s just over two minutes long.

Another way to create familiarity is through lyric writing. If you create a lyric with lots of sense-driven imagery, you have a great chance of sparking a specific memory in your listener. The song You and I by Lady Gaga also does an excellent job of tying an opening lyric back around, but it also fleshes the story out with some truly great sense-oriented lyrics. “It’s been a long time since I came around. It’s been a long time, but I’m back in town. This time, I’m not leaving without you.”

When we first hear this lyric, all we know is that she’s coming back to a place she’s been before, but this time, she’s not leaving without this other person. We don’t know their relationship, we don’t know their history, we know nothing about where this town is, or why she left the first time. In general, our knowledge of the story is pretty vague. This creates questions in your mind, which is awesome because there’s a lot of intrigue. It makes you want to keep listening, to see if your questions will be answered.

This song does a gorgeous job of answering those questions because she really puts you in the seat of the character. She sings lyrics like “you taste like whiskey when you kiss me” and “in the corner of my bar with your high heels on” and “something about lonely nights and my lipstick on your face”. These are sense-driven lyrics, which makes them not only striking, but relatable.

Throughout the song, we learn that the character she’s singing to is from Nebraska and that she’s from New York. We learn that they were lovers and played music together and we start to understand that she truly loves this person.

So, at the end of the song, after all of these stunning, sexy lyrical moments and images, the listener can visualize the story exactly the way they might if these characters were on a screen. We’ve been given the opportunity to fall in love with their love and we believe her when she sings “I’d rather die without you and I”.

And then we hear that final lyric: “it’s been a long time since I came around. It’s been a long time, but I’m back in town. This time I’m not leaving without you,” and we believe her.

♫ Time Stamps:

00:00 - Intro

01:20 - The Buildup

04:13 - Expectations

07:27 - Familiarity

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