Do you ever get goose bumps when listening to music?

There are many informal benchmarks musicians look to when putting together a track to try to determine its quality. Does it make your 2-year-old dance? Does the chorus stick in your head long after you’ve hit the stop button? Does it bring a tear to your eye or a smile to your face, make you want to hit the gym or bang your head? Does it inspire you to tilt your bucket seat back, crank your subwoofers and roll slowly through the neighborhood? Though these litmus tests are unscientific, they tend to be fairly reliable at an almost universal level – at least across your intended audience.

But there’s one listener response to music that’s almost impossible to predict – and as precious as it is elusive: the chill factor. You can’t really plant the chill factor in music because it’s inherently a personal experience. Where lightning may strike some as Celine Dion holds a high note for a seemingly inhuman amount of time, the goose bumps will come to another when they hear Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood testing his distortion pedal before the chorus of “Creep.”

For me, there’s a moment in Nirvana’s “Sliver,” aka “Grandma Take Me Home,” that never fails to raise goose bumps and elicit a primal emotion: as Kurt Cobain finishes the line, “I woke up in my mothers aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarms.” He ravages his throat as he fights to hold on to the word “arms,” which is a perfect metaphor. It’s as though he packs every iota of pain he ever felt in his life into that word – and the juxtaposition of that innocent moment from his childhood, forever lost, against his man-sized hurt is almost unbearable. No matter how many times I hear that song, the chill comes.

Do you experience the “chill factor” when listening to certain songs?