Melodic expectation as an elicitor of music-evoked chills

Music-evoked chills are pleasurable shivers, goosebumps or tingling sensations experienced during musical listening. Research on the characteristics of music perception that elicit chills has focused on low-level acoustic features in small samples of music. We collected a dataset of 1,019 pieces of music timestamped with onset times of 1,806 chills from 402 participants and used computational methods to predict chills onsets from simulations of low-level acoustic and high-level expectation-based elicitors. A machine learning classifier was trained to discriminate passages containing chills from those not containing chills. The results show that chills onsets are predicted better than chance and corroborate existing evidence for acoustic elicitors of chills with a much larger dataset. They also provide empirical evidence that music-evoked chills are elicited by surprise and uncertainty resulting from a high-level psychological process of expectation, which proved a more effective predictor than acoustic elicitors.