India, Sept. 25 -- One of the many luxuries of my superannuated life is the bountiful gift of time, specifically the four or five hours a day (yes!) I can happily burn through doing nothing but listening to music.

Part of it is pure unadulterated passion, part is the joyful occupational "hazard" of writing this column. Lately, however, these listening sessions have also been driven by a bit of scientific research. I've been diving into a 715-song playlist known to researchers as the "chill corpus".

Curated by Remi de Fleurian, a data scientist at Spotify, and Marcus Pearce, who teaches cognitive science at Queen Mary University of London, the playlist was compiled as part of a study on frisson; the goosebumps, or literal shivers down th...