Chills and being moved: music and reward

Evidence label: Well studied (musical pleasure and the brain’s reward regions)

Evidence label: Early evidence (dopamine’s role; chills vs tears)

The first label is for the main finding: musical pleasure goes with activity in the brain’s reward regions. This has been found with several methods and in 17 brain-imaging experiments pooled in a meta-analysis, most of them from labs outside the Montreal–Barcelona research network. It does not mean the studies were large, or that music treats anything. They measured pleasure in a laboratory, not health. The second covers dopamine’s role, which rests on two small studies from one research network, and how chills differ from tears, which rests on a single study.

Author: Raymond Hackland · Last reviewed: 21 October 2026 · Reading time: about 10 minutes

In short

What this is: Shivers down the spine, goose bumps, a lump in the throat, tears: some music moves us so much that the body joins in. This article looks at what researchers have measured when that happens, what Chinese tradition says about sound, emotion and spirit, and how both sit beside the experience of being moved in music-assisted practice. It is part of our Music & Tone series, which starts with Music and stress: what 100+ trials show.

What the evidence says: Intense musical pleasure goes with activity in the same brain network that responds to food and other rewards [1, 4]. Two studies, from the same research network, tied it to dopamine, a chemical messenger in that network (Early evidence): one measured its release at the peak of pleasure in eight people [2], and one changed it with medicines in a double-blind trial with 27 people, which changed how much pleasure they reported [3]. Not everyone gets chills, and some healthy people get much less pleasure from music than most [3, 5]. Chills and tears seem to be two different kinds of peak response, but that comes from one study (Early evidence) [6].

What it means for your practice: Feeling moved by music is a real, measurable response, not something you imagine. But it is not a sign that a practice is “working”, and its absence is not a sign that it isn’t. These studies measured pleasure in a laboratory, not health.

What science says

Label for this section: 🟢 Well studied (musical pleasure and activity in the brain’s reward regions) · 🟡 Early evidence (where marked: dopamine’s role; chills vs tears).

What researchers mean by “chills”

In this research, a “chill” is a brief bodily rush during music: shivers down the spine, goose bumps, sometimes a tingling across the skin [1, 6]. Researchers like chills because they are short, clear events that people can report the moment they happen, for example by pressing a button [3, 6]. A second kind of peak, “tears”, covers weeping or a lump in the throat [6]. In two of the studies below [1, 6], the peaks came mostly with music the listeners had chosen themselves; in a third, pop songs chosen by the researchers did about as well [3].

2001: chills and the brain’s reward regions

Anne Blood and Robert Zatorre at McGill University in Montreal ran one of the first brain-imaging studies of musical chills [1]. They chose ten students (five women, five men, aged 20 to 30) with at least eight years of music training who reliably got chills from particular pieces. Each brought a classical piece of their own, such as Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto or Barber’s Adagio for Strings. Another participant’s piece served as their comparison music [1].

The listeners reported chills in 77% of the scans with their own music, and never with the comparison music, noise or silence [1]. During the most intense chills, heart rate, muscle activity and breathing increased compared with the comparison music [1]. Using PET scanning, which tracks blood flow in the brain, the team found that as chills grew stronger, blood flow changed in areas involved in reward, motivation and emotion: the ventral striatum, midbrain, amygdala, and orbitofrontal and ventromedial prefrontal cortex [1]. The authors noted that these areas also respond to food, sex and addictive drugs [1].

These were ten musicians, chosen because music moved them strongly. It showed that the effect exists, not how common it is.

2011: dopamine at the peak and before it

Label: 🟡 Early evidence (one PET study; eight people analysed).

Valorie Salimpoor, Zatorre and colleagues went a step further [2]. From 217 people who answered their adverts, they selected ten young adults (five women, five men, aged 19 to 24) who got chills from instrumental music they had chosen themselves; another participant’s favourite music served as the comparison, music this listener had rated neutral. Two of the PET scans had to be discarded, so the dopamine result rests on eight people [2]. With a PET method that can detect the release of dopamine, they found that dopamine was released in the striatum during music that brought on peak pleasure: a tracer that competes with dopamine bound about 6–9% less there than with the comparison music [2]. The more intense the chills, the more pleasure people reported (a correlation of r = 0.71, where 1 would be perfect) [2].

They then scanned the same listeners with the same music using fMRI, which can follow changes over seconds. Two parts of the striatum played different roles: the caudate was more active in the build-up before a peak, and the nucleus accumbens during the peak itself [2]. In other words, the anticipation of a favourite moment in a piece has its own reward signal [2].

2019: changing dopamine changes musical pleasure

Label: 🟡 Early evidence (one drug trial, 27 people, from the same research network).

Brain scans show what happens together; they can’t show cause. So Laura Ferreri and colleagues in Barcelona ran a double-blind experiment [3]. Each of 27 healthy volunteers came three times, at least a week apart. Each time they took a capsule containing a dopamine precursor (levodopa), a medicine that blocks some dopamine receptors (risperidone), or a placebo, without knowing which. They then listened to pop songs and to their own favourite music. They rated their pleasure in real time, from “no pleasure” to “chills”, and said how much of their own money they would pay for each of the pop songs [3].

Real-time pleasure, the time spent with chills, a skin-conductance measure of arousal during the most pleasurable moments, and the money people were willing to pay all went in opposite directions under the two medicines. They went up with levodopa and down with risperidone, compared with placebo. The statistically clear differences were between the two medicines [3]. The overall liking rating given after each song only showed a trend [3]. The authors conclude that dopamine plays a causal role in musical pleasure [3]. These medicines were research tools, given in a hospital research setting. The study is about how pleasure works, not a suggestion to take anything.

The wider picture: 17 imaging studies of music

A 2021 meta-analysis by Mas-Herrero, Zatorre and colleagues combined brain-imaging results from 17 studies of music (330 participants) and 21 of food (373 participants) [4]. Eleven of the 17 music experiments came from labs outside the Montreal and Barcelona groups behind most of the studies above [4]. Music and food both engaged a shared set of reward-related regions, including the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the ventral striatum and the insula. Each also had its own pattern, music in regions for hearing and learning [4]. So music doesn’t simply copy other rewards. It reaches a shared reward network by its own route.

Not everyone gets chills

In the 2019 experiment, 16 of the 27 participants reported chills during the placebo session [3]. In a 2014 study, the same research network described healthy people who got little pleasure from music and showed no bodily arousal to it, even though they perceived music normally and responded normally to winning money [5]. The researchers called this specific musical anhedonia (“anhedonia” means a reduced capacity for pleasure) and took it as a sign that people differ in how music reaches their reward system [5]. If music rarely gives you chills, that is ordinary variation, not a flaw.

Chills and tears: two kinds of peak?

Label: 🟡 Early evidence (one study, two separate groups).

Kazuma Mori and Makoto Iwanaga in Japan studied tears as well as chills [6]. From a survey of 154 students, they formed two groups of undergraduates: 32 who more often got chills from music, and 34 who more often got tears. Each listened to three songs, with lyrics, that had moved them before, and to three comparison songs that another participant in the same group had chosen as their own, matched by the researchers [6]. Both kinds of peak felt pleasurable and came with deeper breathing. But chills came with a rise in skin conductance, a sign of arousal, while tears came with slower breathing as the heart rate rose [6]. Listeners rated chill songs as both happy and sad, tear songs as sad, and tear songs as calmer [6].

The authors suggest that chills and tears are two different peak emotions, and argue that tears involve pleasure from sadness [6]. Because each group was tested separately, though, the differences could partly reflect the people rather than the response, a limit the authors note themselves [6]. This needs repeating.

How sure is all this?

• Solid: that intense musical pleasure goes with activity in the brain’s reward regions has been found in brain-imaging studies, including 17 experiments pooled in a meta-analysis, most from labs outside the Montreal–Barcelona network [1, 4].
• Less solid: the dopamine evidence comes from two small studies, a PET study analysed in eight people and a drug trial with 27 [2, 3]. Many of the key studies are small, and [1]–[5] all share authors from one connected network of researchers in Montreal and Barcelona. That’s normal for a young field, but independent repetition matters.
• Not tested here: none of these studies looked at health, at Qigong, or at music played during breath or movement practice. They used people’s favourite music in a lab.

Our article Study types explained: from anecdote to meta-analysis explains why a drug experiment like [3] can show cause where a scan can’t.

What tradition says

Label for this section: 🔵 Tradition only (traditional concepts) · 📜 Documented history (the texts).

Chinese tradition has its own, much older language for how sound, emotion and the inner life belong together. In chapter 5 of the Suwen, part of the medical classic Huangdi neijing, each of the five phases is given an organ, a musical tone, a vocal sound and an emotion, among other things. Anger goes with the liver, joy with the heart, pensiveness (思) with the spleen, worry or sorrow (忧) with the lungs and fear with the kidneys [7]. Chapter 8 calls the heart “the ruler, from which the light of spirit comes forth” (心者，君主之官也，神明出焉) [8]. Shen (神), spirit, is linked with the heart. Our articles The Chinese five tones and the Five Phases and Jing, qi and shen: the three treasures of inner alchemy explain these ideas in full.

These are correspondences in a system of thought: tones, organs, emotions and seasons sorted into matching groups. They are not measurements, and they are a different kind of knowledge from the brain studies above. A brain region that responds to music is not the heart, and dopamine is not shen. We keep the two side by side, not merged.

What I share builds on this tradition in its own way. On the main site, each day of the immersion pairs an organ with an emotion and its counterpart, such as “Lungs, grief to courage” and “Kidneys, fear to wisdom” [9]. Those pairings are my practice’s modern reading. Anger and fear match the Suwen list exactly; grief and worry match it depending on how 忧 and 思 are translated (忧 can mean sorrow or worry). The site starts the heart from impatience, where the Suwen gives joy. The Triple Burner is not in the Suwen list at all; on the site its day moves “from fragmented to harmony”, which is my own reading from practice. The virtues to move towards (courage, wisdom and so on) are not in the list either, except joy, which the Suwen gives as the heart’s own emotion. The pairings describe a practice, not an effect.

Where popular claims go beyond the evidence

Label for this section: 🟠 Speculative.

• “Music is a dopamine hit, just like a drug.” Music engages parts of the same reward network [1, 4], and in two small studies dopamine played a role [2, 3]. But a shared network is not the same experience, and the meta-analysis found music-specific routes too [4].
• “Chills mean energy or qi is moving.” Chills are measurable bodily and brain responses to music [1, 6]. Nobody has measured qi, and no study links the two.
• “Tears in music are healing.” One study found a calmer-looking breathing pattern with music-induced tears, and its authors speculate about catharsis [6]. That is a single laboratory study, not evidence of any health effect.
• “If you don’t feel chills, you’re blocked.” Many healthy people rarely or never get chills from music [3, 5]. It says nothing about your practice or your health.
• “Special frequencies give you chills.” The studies used people’s own favourite recordings or ordinary pop songs [1, 3, 6]. None compared tunings or tested Solfeggio tones or 432 Hz; see Solfeggio frequencies: where they come from and what the evidence says.

How this relates to the Six Healing Sounds, Qigong and neigong

Label for this section: 🟢 Well studied (musical pleasure and the brain’s reward regions) · 🟡 Early evidence (dopamine; chills vs tears) · 🔵 Tradition only (shen and the organ and emotion pairings).

Resonance Heritage Qi is a music-assisted practice, and the main site describes each sound as “a passage from shadow emotion toward light virtue” [9]. So it is fair to ask what this research says about being moved during practice. Here is what it does and doesn’t tell us.

• Your own music often moves you most, but not always. In two of the studies, music the listeners had chosen themselves produced most of the peaks [1, 6]. In a third, pop songs chosen by the researchers drew pleasure ratings similar to people’s own favourites [3]. My immersions use curated instrumental playlists for each day [9]. Whether shared music moves a group in the same way as a person’s own favourite piece hasn’t been studied.
• Anticipation counts. In one small study, the build-up before a familiar peak had its own reward signal (Early evidence) [2]. The immersions return each day to the sounds already learned [9], which builds familiarity of its own. That link is our observation, not a finding.
• The body joins in. Chills and tears come with changes in breathing, heart rate and skin [1, 6]. In the Six Healing Sounds you are not only listening: the main site describes gentle movement, conscious breathing, vocal resonance and visualisation [9]. No study has tested music-evoked emotion in that combination, and no study has tested my practice. Slow breathing has its own research, covered in Slow breathing and heart rate variability: what actually happens in your body.
• Emotion is named on purpose. Each day of the immersion focuses on one organ, one sound and one emotion [9]. That structure takes its meaning from tradition, 🔵 Tradition only, and research doesn’t test it. The organ pairings are traditional theory, not anatomy (see Liu Zi Jue: where the Six Healing Sounds come from). Shen and the heart belong to the inner language of neigong (see Jing, qi and shen: the three treasures of inner alchemy and What is neigong? An introduction).
• Baseline. For what music does to stress measures on average, see Music and stress: what 100+ trials show.

Both kinds of knowledge matter here. The laboratory shows that being moved by music is real and has a biology. The practice gives that experience a place, a structure and a meaning. Neither replaces the other. If you are moved during practice, that is worth noticing. It is not proof that something is working, and if you aren’t moved, that is not a sign that something is wrong.

Strong feelings can come up in music and breath practice. Go gently and pause when you need to. If you have a health condition, please read Who should be careful with breathing practices before you start.

Resonance Heritage Qi is a personal, music-assisted practice inspired by Liu Zi Jue: connected to it, not a replacement for the traditional form or for study with a teacher of that tradition. No study has tested it, and we make no claims about its effects.

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Sources

1. Blood AJ, Zatorre RJ, 2001. Intensely pleasurable responses to music correlate with activity in brain regions implicated in reward and emotion. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 98(20):11818–11823. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.191355898
2. Salimpoor VN, Benovoy M, Larcher K, Dagher A, Zatorre RJ, 2011. Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music. Nature Neuroscience 14(2):257–262. https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2726
3. Ferreri L, Mas-Herrero E, Zatorre RJ, Ripollés P, Gomez-Andres A, Alicart H, et al., 2019. Dopamine modulates the reward experiences elicited by music. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 116(9):3793–3798. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1811878116
4. Mas-Herrero E, Maini L, Sescousse G, Zatorre RJ, 2021. Common and distinct neural correlates of music and food-induced pleasure: a coordinate-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 123:61–71. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2020.12.008
5. Mas-Herrero E, Zatorre RJ, Rodriguez-Fornells A, Marco-Pallarés J, 2014. Dissociation between musical and monetary reward responses in specific musical anhedonia. Current Biology 24(6):699–704. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2014.01.068
6. Mori K, Iwanaga M, 2017. Two types of peak emotional responses to music: the psychophysiology of chills and tears. Scientific Reports 7:46063. https://doi.org/10.1038/srep46063
7. Huangdi neijing Suwen 黃帝內經素問, chapter 5, 陰陽應象大論. Chinese text, Wikisource edition, accessed 20 October 2026. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/黃帝內經/素問第二卷
8. Huangdi neijing Suwen 黃帝內經素問, chapter 8, 靈蘭秘典論. Chinese text, Wikisource edition, accessed 20 October 2026. https://zh.wikisource.org/wiki/黃帝內經/素問第三卷
9. Resonance Heritage Qi. Main website: Practice and Immersions sections, accessed 22 October 2026. https://resonanceheritageqi.com/

See also: Unschuld PU, Tessenow H, 2011. Huang Di Nei Jing Su Wen: An Annotated Translation of Huang Di’s Inner Classic – Basic Questions, 2 vols. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-26698-8.

Source quality note: [1], [2], [3], [5] and [6] are peer-reviewed laboratory studies with small samples: 10 people in [1], 8 in the PET analysis of [2], 27 in [3] and two groups of 32 and 34 in [6]. [3] is a double-blind, placebo-controlled crossover experiment, the strongest design here for cause and effect. [4] is a meta-analysis of 17 music and 21 food brain-imaging experiments; 11 of the music experiments come from other research groups. [1]–[5] share authors from one research network (McGill University, Montreal, and the University of Barcelona and the Bellvitge Institute), so independent repetition remains important. [6] compared two separate groups. None of these studies measured health outcomes or tested Qigong. [7] and [8] are classical primary texts read in a public Chinese edition (Wikisource is used only as a text repository, not as a reference work). The Wikisource page names no base edition, so we checked the passages against the Sibu congkan edition of Wang Bing’s annotated Suwen in the Song revision by Lin Yi and others (重廣補注黃帝內經素問), as transcribed by the Kanripo project (KR3e0001); the lines match. The translations are ours. For a complete annotated English translation, see also Unschuld and Tessenow, listed above; we have not checked its renderings of these passages. [9] is our own website.

Disclaimer

This article is for general education only. It is not medical advice and does not replace diagnosis or treatment by a doctor or other qualified health professional. Qigong and the Six Healing Sounds are traditional practices; we make no claims that they cure, treat or prevent any illness. If you have a health condition, are pregnant, or are unsure whether a practice suits you, please talk to your doctor first.