Do certain songs ever give you chills and goosebumps?

Funny you should post this just now – I saw one of my favourite types of YouTube videos about 10 minutes ago. Have you heard of Enchroma glasses? They help colourblind people see colours. So there’s a bunch of videos on Youtube, if you need a good eye-washing, showing people getting surprised with these glasses for their birthdays or whatever, and seeing what trees and the sky and their partners and children look like for the first time in living colour.

And it always brings to mind Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World, which always gives me goosebumps, even if I’m just humming the song to myself.

Yes. Every time I hear them the emotion is strong.

This is from Wikipedia:

Canadian researchers have suggested that when humans are moved by music their brains behave as if reacting to delicious food, psychoactive drugs, or money.[17] The pleasure experience is driven by the chemical dopamine, which produces physical effects known as “chills” that cause changes in heart rate, breathing, temperature and the skin’s electrical conductance. The responses correlate with the degree to which people rate the “pleasurability” of music.[18] Dopamine release is greatest when listeners had a strong emotional response to music. “If music-induced emotional states can lead to dopamine release, as our findings indicate, it may begin to explain why musical experiences are so valued,” wrote the scientists.

I completely believe that. I have visceral emotional reactions to certain songs.

Absolutely. And Dinah Washington is a goddess!
I love her version of Our Love is Here to Stay.

Yes. It’s never fight-or-flight for me that gives me that sort of reaction. It’s more when it…
well, you know the musical metaphors “it strikes a chord” or “it resonates”? For me it’s when it does that with my more interior emotions. It can happen in various ways – sometimes it’s just the way the music builds energy, which can make me want to move all-out (not the safest thing when I’m driving), or when it riles up some emotions that resonate – passion, conviction, wonder, grandeur… sometimes it does get me feeling aggressive and/or unstoppable, but not in a fight-or-flight way.

(Also not the same thing as wanting to beat up the musician, the person playing the track, or to flee it because it’s so obnoxious, which also happens.)

Oh, and apologies to Wikipedia’s Canadian researchers, but I don’t think for me it’s much like a food, drug, or money reaction. More like a love, passion, sorrow, emotion, delight, adrenaline, and/or combat reaction. I can buy the dopamine, conductance, pleasure reactions, but those aren’t much surprise.

I absolutely love Disturbed’s cover of The Sound of Silence. I was never a huge fan of the original, and I’m not particularly a fan of Disturbed…but mix the two together and I get chills!
https://youtu.be/u9Dg-g7t2l4

It’s called frisson. Orchestral music or very poignant lyrics or movie scenes do it for me.

Yes, and sometimes at inopertune moments. Like you’re at a party, or event, or someone’s house, and a certain song or piece of music comes on and you not only get the goosebumps, but you get all weepy too. I’ve had that happen numerous times. Sometimes it’s due to a memory, but other times it just hits you, in a profound way, and you can’t really say why. Why that particular piece of music instead of another similar piece.