AI could help us deconstruct why some songs just make us feel so good

The researchers first scoured music streaming sites like Spotify for songs with very few plays, tagged either "happy" or "sad." Through a series of human testers, 60 pieces for each emotion were narrowed down to a final list of three: two that reliably induced sadness (Ólafur Arnalds's "Fyrsta" and Michael Kamen's "Discovery of the Camp") and one that reliably induced happiness (Lullatone's "Race Against the Sunset"). One hundred participants who hadn't heard the songs before split into two groups, listened to all three pieces, and either took an fMRI scan or wore pulse, heat, and electricity sensors on their skin and rated the intensity of their emotions on a scale of 0 to 10.