What makes a happy song? Chances are it has more seventh chords
By Andrew WagnerNov. 14, 2017 , 7:01 PM
You can probably tell happy and sad songs apart just by listening to a few bars—but what is it, musically, that makes the difference? In Western music, major and minor chords have long been linked to joy and sorrow. So a group of scientists decided to examine how other chords might affect emotion. First, they compiled their data: nearly 90,000 popular English-language guitar songs recorded from the 1950s to the 2010s across five regions of the world. Then, they looked at how the chords matched the song lyrics. Each song got a happiness score, based on a popular crowdsourced data set that ranks 10,000 of the most common English words for positive and negative emotions.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/11/what-makes-happy-song-chances-are-it-has-more-seventh-chords
