A Dutch neuroscientist did some serious research to find out how the brain translates music into emotion and he focused specifically on the music that makes us feel good. This gentleman figured out a mathematical equation to help him analyze the anatomy of the music that makes us feel warm and fuzzy.
He looked at a data base that contained 126 songs from the past 50 years that made us feel really good. He applied statistical analysis to identify the characteristics of the song responsible for making us feel good. This neuroscientist scoured scientific literature to see which keys and tempos were the most responsible for make us feel good. Then he looked at the scores for the key and tempo before looking at the lyrics to see which ones had the identified characteristics.
After identifying all of these things, he then applied a regression model to determine which songs could then be classified as feel good songs. At the end, he came up with the Feel Good Index (FGI) which contains all the identified lyrics that make us feel good, the tempo in beats per minute, and the key. Basically the higher the FGI a song has, the better it will make us feel. The ideal feel good song has happy lyrics with a tempo of 150 beats per minute and is in a major third musical key. If a song has all of these characteristics, it will positively impact your mood, making you feel so much better.
The song that hit the top of the list is "Don't Stop Me Now" by Queen. This song meets all of the criteria needed to be classed as a proper feel good song. The thing is, even without lyrics, music can make us feel better, or impact us emotionally. It has been found that the beats in music without lyrics, triggers the motor areas of our brain, making us want to move around. These fast tempo songs, feel more energetic, are more likely to make us get up and move or at least move parts of our bodies, and are linked to a more joyful state of being.
It is not known by the brain associates major keys with positive emotion and minor keys with negative emotion. It is thought this association is a learned behavior although some people claim it is actually a biological reaction. There are other studies out there which link easy going music with the ability to sooth away road rage and with lowering your blood pressure.
The one thing this neuroscientist did discover is that the mathematics works as long as someone does not have a personal association such as if "The Twist" was playing when their boyfriend broke up with them, they might not feel as good after listening to it but for most people it would cheer them up because it meets the criteria. Let me know what you think, I'd love to hear. Have a great day and a great weekend.
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