The choice is surprising a lot of people.
Nothing sets the mood like a little music. When you head out for a run, upbeat tunes are your best friend. Following a breakup, nothing feels better than good cry with a little Adele, and when you leave work for the weekend it’s totally appropriate to blast “Friday” by Rebecca Black (hey, we don’t judge, you do you). But what should you press play on when you need to find your happy place?
According to a group of researchers at the University of Missouri, the happiest song in the world is…”Don’t Stop Me Now” by Queen.
The team came to this rather peculiar finding after studying the effects of music on participant’s moods. Over the course of two weeks, the researchers came to the unsurprising conclusion that music makes humans happier, but to distil which music makes us most happy, the team had to create a specific formula.
Neuroscientist Jacob Jolij created the happiness formula by studying 126 songs from a 50 year period, Indy100 reports, which he picked after surveying a group of 2,000 British people about their favorite tunes. Jolij then found the songs with the highest scores (two-thirds of respondents noted “Don’t Stop Me Now” as a favorite), determined their beats per minute, the key, the theme and analyzed the lyrics.
Of his research Jolij wrote:
The pattern was very clear. The average tempo of a ‘feel good’-song was substantially higher than the average pop song. Where the average tempo of pop songs is around 118 beats per minute (BPM), the list of feel good songs had an average tempo of around 140 to 150 BPM.
And it appears the Queen song has all the attributes for happiness. But how did the internet feel about this selection? Not great, according to Reddit users. But hey, to each is own. Dance the night away to any song that makes you feel good.
Share on Facebook
