The Feel-Good Algorithm

Dutch neuroscientist Jacob Jolij offers a good argument that while there may be an equation for everything, not everything is an equation.

Meeri Kim wrote a Washington Post story about Jolij's research into what kinds of songs make people feel good and why they do. According to Jolij, it has to do with positive references in the lyrics, the tempo and the key. He used a survey of the most popular "feel-good" songs of the last 50 or so years to try to sort out these characteristics and see which ones correlated with listener response, and then built a formula that would describe which songs were more "feel-good" than others.

Some of the research is obvious, of course. Minor keys can make us apprehensive while major keys don't, and faster tempos usually seem to energize us more, even when the songs are from the same band. I'll have AC/DC's "Let's Play Ball" on the iPod shuffle for a treadmill session but probably not "Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution," because the first song is a lot faster.

Jolij points out the highly subjective nature of his research. Even with his feel-good formula, he notes that the memory attachments we have for different songs increase their impact on our moods, either up or down. The list of Top 10 Feel-Good songs his formula produces has an excellent example.

The top feel-good song of the last 50 years or so is Queen's 1979 single "Don't Stop Me Now." The article has a list of the top 10 and it's interesting to me that the only song on the list I couldn't remember at all was that one. I listened to an album-oriented rock (AOR) station during those years, so I know I must have heard the cut off the 1978 Jazz album, but I had no memory of it. It was a top 10 song in England but peaked at 86 in the U.S. I checked it out on YouTube and liked it well enough, but still had zero memory of it and it produced no particular upbeat mood for me.

On the other hand, the number 10, Katrina and the Waves' 1985 single "Walking on Sunshine" will get my fingers snapping in a heartbeat, put me in a mood to take an extra spin around the block until it finishes on my car radio and brighten just about any day it shows up. It doesn't have any ties to specific incidents in my life beyond being played at college parties I probably enjoyed, but because I remember it there's an uplift that the Queen song doesn't produce.

I'm also curious about the time frame of the study. No quotes in the story or the press release from the company that released it indicates why it only went back to the 1960s and it would be interesting to see where some of the earliest rock and R&B hits placed in terms of their feel-good inducement. Because, nothing against Billy Joel (who did an outstanding version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" at last night's Game 3 of the World Series), but LaVern Baker's 1956 "Jim Dandy" has it all over his 1983 "Uptown Girl." And given how his relationship with the woman who starred in the video ended, Joel might say the same today himself.