The 10 happiest songs according to science
Music can bring happiness, but some tunes will bring more.
📝 Words: 668 | 🕰️ Estimated Reading time: about 4 mins
Summer has finally arrived in the Northern Hemisphere ☀️
This glorious season brings warmth, extended daylight, and generally uplifts people's mood.
Yes, because exposure to sunlight releases serotonin in the brain.
And higher levels of serotonin correlate with better mood and feelings of satisfaction and calmness, while lower levels are linked to depression and anxiety.
Despite the remarkable advancements in technology in the last decades, we still cannot control the weather1 to guarantee sunny days that boost our mood.
Following my recent newsletter titled “Why Bad is stronger than Good?”, I felt I needed to write one newsletter offering the tools to brighten a cloudy day.
I wanted to provide additional ways to counteract negativity and boost our mood. Something that we could control and whose effects are verified by science.
What better solution than music?
Studies show that listening to music can lights up every part of our brain, and it can reduce stress, anxiety and depression.
Listening to music can also make us happier, boosting our happiness, mood, and subjective well-being.
Additionally, one study found that playing more upbeat music led to improvements in processing speed2, which can make us more productive and therefore happier for having completed the tasks we planned to do.
Ok. Given this information, wouldn’t it be nice to know the pop songs that can lift our mood the most?
This was precisely what Jacob Jolij, a cognitive neuroscientist at Groningen University, did in 2015.
Jolij analyzed data on musical preferences in the UK and Ireland, focusing on songs that improve the mood.
He was obviously aware that taste in music is subjective, highly personal and strongly dependent on social context and personal associations.
If you think about it, we've all probably had at least one moment in our life when we passionately defended a song or a band we loved against the criticism of a classmate, friend, or sibling.
Like that one time I had to defend Peter Gabriel against a claim of being “boring”.
Taste in music is highly subjective (e.g. I love listening to Peter Gabriel singing in a flower costume - go figure), but Jolij decided to analyze the data and see if the songs shared a set of distinctive characteristics.
He used lyrics, tempo, and key as the variables in a formula to calculate the strength of a song’s feel-good nature.
He discovered that the happiest songs:
tend to have a higher tempo (>150 bpm, beats per minute) than the average pop song (which has between 140 and 150 bpm).
revolve around either cheerful events or lively, lyrical nonsense.
And according to Jolij’s formula, these are the 10 happiest songs for British and Irish:
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun – Cyndi Lauper (Youtube | Spotify)
Walking on Sunshine – Katrina & The Waves (Youtube | Spotify)
Do you agree with the list?
What’s your “happiest song” that is not on this list?
See you next Sunday 🗓️
Thanks,
Giacomo
However, we can increase rain or snow with cloud seeding.
A former colleague played so much upbeat music in his headphones that he boosted everyone's productivity around him. However, there were some colleagues that didn’t enjoy the music and were just annoyed.
Such a good list. Thank you for sharing it! I also love “Closer to Fine” by the Indigo Girls. Music is definitely a mood-enhancing drug for me. 🎶
And once again the format of one of your issues inspired me! Jokes aside, really interesting and I really like the way you make everything so direct without losing important concepts. Thanks for sharing Giacomo!