Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" is officially the happiest song on Earth according to a 2015 study by Dutch cognitive neuroscientist Dr Jacob Jolij. At the request of British electronic band ‘Alba’, he analyzed in a scientific way how songs shape our mood, and created a formula to show which music makes us feel better.
He did add a proviso:
"Music appreciation is highly personal and strongly depends on social context, and personal associations. In that respect, the idea of a 'feel good formula' is a bit odd," he commented.
Dr Jolij discovered that: “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 BPM, the list of feel good songs had an average tempo of around 140 to 150 BPM.” Happy songs are also written in a major key, and either about happy events or complete nonsense.
Dr Jolij chose 126 songs from a previous UK survey and found out that the song that best fulfills this formulaic criteria was Queen’s "Don’t Stop Me Now."
Here is a link to the complete list of top ten tunes he identified :
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3ZDXHzb4OhBCfLFZbcRh8x
