But none of the non-musical ASMR trigger videos give me the chills. Yet I couldn't help but feel that some of the pushback against musical triggers was standard Internet-niche boundary-policing. What's more, the r/asmr guideline's contention that "most people" get the chills from music — or frisson — didn't square with my experience: When I described those tingles to friends, pretty much no one had any idea what I was talking about. (My mom says she gets them from The Phantom of the Opera, but that's about it.) It seemed like if I wanted to figure out what I was experiencing, I had to take this to the experts.

Unfortunately, there aren't any. To date, ASMR's existence has been established only by the overlapping symptoms described by people who say they've experienced it. As Steven Novella of SkepticBlog reported, a search for the term in the massive PubMed.gov database of medical publications yields no results. "It’s mainly been talk so far, but we are very interested and consider it one of our goals: to get assistance from the scientific community in some capacity," says Andrew MacMuiris, founder of the pioneering ASMR blog The Unnamed Feeling and an outreach agent for the ASMR Research site. "I imagine it will be necessary."

Turns out the answer there is yes and no. I reached out to a number of experts in the fields of music cognition, evolutionary psychology, and social psychology, and while none of them knew of any work on the phenomenon, none of them expressed much doubt about its existence, either. "It exists as a physiological effect, for sure," says Robin Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at Oxford University.

Hauke Egermann, a research associate with the Audio Communication Group at Technische Universität Berlin, points to a 2011 study that tested musical chill triggers alongside other sounds, the touch of a scalp massager and a feather, and even the sour tastes of grapefruit and lemon as a potential precedent for ASMR's non-musical triggers. "If listeners or participants report this experience in an experimental setting to me, I must take it for real," he says. "However, to my best knowledge, the term 'ASMR' has not be used in our research field."

In the meantime we've only got the reports of people who've experienced both ASMR and musical frisson, and they point to some pretty clear differences. "It's like a buildup, an emotional climax," says the r/asmr moderator Mahi_Mahi of frisson. "It makes you feel energized and alive." She describes ASMR as "more subdued...you want to melt in your chair and purr like a cat. This can last for quite a long time, as long as the triggers last," as opposed to the more momentary feeling of frisson. MacMuiris concurs: "ASMR elicits a pleasurable tingling sensation and a relaxed feeling — even to the point where someone falls asleep. Frisson does produce a tingling sensation, but it is somewhat different, and it amps you."

Mahi_Mahi notes that while music that shares the same soothing or repetitive characteristics of non-musical ASMR triggers can cause the response, that's very different from the "big climax category" of music and its separate set of resulting sensations. Other ASMR Redditors break it down in much the same way; across the board, the frisson researchers I spoke with associated the sensation with intense emotion, not relaxation. The word "euphoria" gets used a lot to describe both phenomena, but with frisson it means "psyched up," and with ASMR "blissed out."

Many experts seem to draw a distinction between the two as well. David Huron, Professor at the School of Music at Ohio State University, says ASMR is not the same as frisson. "The [ASMR] effect is clearly strongly related to the perception of non-threat and altruistic attention," says Huron, who notes that there's a strong similarity to physical grooming in primates. "Non-human primates derive enormous pleasure (bordering on euphoria) when being groomed by a grooming partner." And, says Huron, they groom each other not to get clean, but rather to bond with each other.

Oxford's Dunbar, who has studied primate grooming extensively, contrasts the beta-endorphin release responsible for grooming's relaxation effect with the dopamine dump responsible for bursts of excitement like those experienced during musical frisson. Frisson, he says, "looks suspiciously like a 'pay attention' mechanism that allows you to zoom in on a potential mate/friend/ally or whatever so that you can now start to target them and develop an appropriate relationship (that will ultimately be built on the endorphin mechanism)." That could explain the tingling component to the relaxation-based ASMR experience.

So that leaves musical chills as their own separate beast. And though they're far from unheard of, they're less common than ASMR people allege. "The literature in music cognition tends to claim that between 1/3 and 1/2 of people experience chills in response to music," says Lisa Margulis, Associate Professor and Director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas. She says certain kinds of people are more likely to get them: performing musicians (a whopping 90 percent!), women, and people who rank low on the "sensation seeking" dimension of personality. "They don't need a roller coaster to blow their mind," Margulis says. "A few measures of Mahler is enough."

Interestingly, the type of person you are matters more than the type of music you listen to. Emily C. Nusbaum, a researcher and doctoral student at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, notes that in a study she helped conduct, those who rank high on "openness to experience" also experienced chills more frequently. These types of people tend to listen to more technically complex music — so researchers thought at first that they got chills more often simply because they tended to listen to more chill-inducing music. But in fact, says Nusbaum, "We were surprised to find that the type of music people listened to really didn't matter in terms of getting chills."

What did matter was the structure, not the genre. "Large shifts in tempo or volume and sudden entrance or exit of vocals or instruments seem to be the big winners in eliciting chills," she says, citing work done by Huron and Margulis. Or as Egermann puts it, "Music that has the capability to surprise listeners might be more likely to induce strong emotional responses, including those that are so strong that they include chills."

Margulis agrees. "Generally, [frisson-inducing passages] involve some sudden, radical change — these moments are surprising and unexpected," she says. "In addition, they're often high energy: really loud, or involving lots of instruments playing all at once." She and Huron pinpointed "The Final Cut" by Pink Floyd as a case in point.