Was just listening to Hans Zimmer’s Time, which inspired this question.
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The truth is that no one is quite sure. The sensation you’re describing is called “frisson”. We can predict what is likely to cause it (though the specifics vary from person to person) and we can measure it happening, why can chemically or physically increase someone’s susceptibility to it, but *why* it happens is a bit of a mystery.
Frisson is a set of real physical responses by the body to something it experiences. In music, there are lots of characteristics that often lead to someone experiencing frisson, but they can often be generalised as the music doing something slightly different to what we’re lead to expect. Music is all about patterns and predictability and sometimes breaking the patterns and doing something unexpected. Our brain is essentially a machine designed to recognise patterns, so something like an unexpected key shift really stands out and our body responds to it – sometimes with excitement/pleasure reactions like those associated with frisson.
“Epic” music often produces frisson because it’s very climatical – you’re brain *knows* there’s a change coming and the anticiption and final surprise/relief when it does produces pleasurable body sensations. It’s no accident that this sort of music is used in cinema, or indeed religion! I think it’s also part of the appeal of dubstep (where the listener is constantly surprised by changes in key, interjections of new beats, etc).
It’s something that’s parodied [in this SNL clip](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoUV7Q1C1SU) – there’s a continuous build up to “the bass drop” and the crowd goes crazy because their brain is constantly telling them “This is it – here it comes – next time – nearly here”, and after all that build up the eventual shift in the music creates such a powerful physiological reaction that they can’t handle it.
But *why* does our body associate this kind of build-up then change with the sensation of frisson? No one knows for sure.
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