Music Monday – The Happy Song

Apr 29, 2018

2 min read

Every parent knows the struggles of a crying baby and more than one of us has Googled ‘How to make your baby stop crying.’ New parents especially know that when your baby is crying and you’ve tried everything you can think of to get them to stop, you wish there was a secret formula to getting them to stop.

Well there kind of is.

Caspar Addyman, an expert in child development, and Lauren Stewart, a musical psychologist teamed up with baby food manufacturer Cow & Gate (based out of the UK) to create a song that would be scientifically proven to make babies happy.

Through extensive research the team found that the song had to be in a major key, be simple and repetitive and have a broad range of things included in it to keep babies interested. It also had to be uptempo to mirror a babies heart rate, which is faster than an adults.

After a public survey to find the type of noises babies loved the most (ie: raspberries, beep beeps, and wwwwweeeeeeee) and discovering that babies prefer the high-pitched ‘baby’ voice of a woman, they hired Grammy-Award-Winning artist Imogen Heap to put the song together.

But Does It Work?

The result is a catchy, uptempo pop song appropriately titled, The Happy Song. But does it work?

For Clara, it worked wonders. She would almost immediately stop crying and listen, or watch the song intently. While she wouldn’t always laugh or giggle through it, it would almost always stop her crying. Soon we were able to sing it ourselves with a fair amount of success. And while not all results will work for all babies, I think you’ll be able to see from the video below (they asked families to film their babies listening to the song) that kids love the song.

I highly recommend giving The Happy Song by Imogen Heap a try the next time your baby is in full-on meltdown mode!

Reading books is also a great way to help kids sleep, check out these ones that are Clara approved! For more Music Monday posts check out Meytal Cohen and Jinjer.