Everybody knows good music can make people happy. You don’t need scientists to present you with charts and graphs to prove it. And yet, scientists still enjoy bringing up the topic. Some scientists even say that going to music concerts can make you happy.
Two such scientists are Melissa K. Weinberg and Dawn Joseph. They conducted the study in Australia by interviewing 1,000 random people back in 2014. Their findings were people who enjoyed engaging with music and attending musical events tend to have better subjective well-being. Subjective well-being (SWB) is term psychologists use to evaluate individual’s life satisfaction level. It’s just a roundabout way of calling happiness.
So there you have it. If you want to live a happier life, go and see a music concert.
Still not sure if going to music concerts can make you happy?
Ok, you do have the right to doubt it. After all, these kinds of studies should be taken with a grain of salt.
First off, the study in Australia only discovered the correlation. It didn’t show any causation in any way.
Another thing the study brought up was that going to concerts alone didn’t have the same effect as going with other people. The communal experience plays a big part too. We may as well conclude that happy people tend to spend some time doing fun activities, outside, with their friends and families.
The result of the interview also didn’t take into account the mood of the people being interviewed. It’s always possible that the interviewee was a generally a happy person, yet he or she was in bad mood during the interview. That simple thing could skew the result.
Realistically, if you don’t have the time to spare or money to splurge on music concerts, there are more economical ways that you can try to feel happy. Listening to ambient music is one.
“Huh?”
It’s true. You can relive your childhood by playing ambient sound of rain in a wooden cabin. Reminiscent your happy younger self as you were visiting your grandparents in the countryside.
If you’re a fan of the Harry Potter series, you can try reading the first book, playing the Hogwarts Express ambient sounds on your computer as you read Ron’s and Harry’s first ever conversation. It’s going to be magical.
Seriously, there are tons of memory and fantasy-invoking ambient sounds available at the ambient-mixer.com. You can get almost every imaginable ambient music in the world. In the rare case that you can’t find anything you like, feel free to mix your own.
