Today is...World Music Therapy Day

Music can be powerful, the right tunes can lift our mood, calm, motivate and comfort us and over our lifetime we develop a taste for certain genres of music and we all have our go-to songs when we need a bit of a boost but Dutch cognitive neuroscientist, Dr. Jacob Jolij, recently ran an expansive survey of songs ranging across all genres to compile the top feel-good songs that scientifically make people happy.
The science bit is that to be a mood changer the song must have a high tempo, positive lyrics and the listener should be able to sing-a-long to it and for your mood enhancing pleasure the top song is Queen's Don't Stop Me Now but before you upload it onto your MP3 player and become a shooting star leaping through the sky or a tiger defying the laws of gravity or even a racing car passing by like Lady Godiva, consider the results of this other study from BBC Gardeners Time of all places.
King Charles has often been lauded as a ruby short of a crown for talking to his plants because rather than talking to them he should have sang some Black Sabbath instead.
In an experiment, different genres of music were played into four greenhouses and the ones that grew up to be the biggest and healthiest was the blooms that had the heavy metal directed at them.
Hilariously, the greenhouse that had the soothing tones of Cliff Richards played to them all died, i'd like to think it was suicide, but yet more human research shows that if you favour a more Heavy Metal strand of music then you are actually a lot less aggressive than your T-Shirts lets on, being gentle, intuitive, creative and introverted so listening to Metallica in the queue at Tesco could actually reduce your desire to use the box of PG Tips in your basket to beat to a pulp the man who is holding you all up as he looks for his debit card.
Listening to Pop music can increase confidence as can hearing hip-hop such as 'The Message' by Grand Master Flash & The Furious Five which boffins at the University of Cambridge have said can help soothe a troubled mind as they generally offer a message of hope and whatever your music of choice it can certainly be very emotive and can stir some deep emotions so the Cambridge boffins are probably on to something and it may be rap music for some and Beethoven for others.
Personally, i find listening to Christmas songs at any time of the year a massive lifter and has the added bonus of telling my family if they can hear 'Frosty the Snowman' coming from the CD player in July, it probably isn't the best time to ask for a favour.