Arts & Lifestyle

The Happiest Song

Lincoln Ahn

30 Sep 2025 — 3 min read

Illustration by Oscar Bolton Green / NYTimes

Nursery rhymes and children's sing-a-longs have been an effective way to calm down and entertain children. However, with the improvement of child psychology practices and mood monitoring tools, the methods available to designers for creating child-oriented products have never been more precise. One key example is with "The Happy Song" by Imogen Heap (2019), a song created specifically to calm down children.

By the time the music proper kicks in, with its jouncing 4/4 strings and its sprightly whistled melody, she has invariably stopped crying altogether. She turns toward the speakers, tears still rolling down her cheeks, and a smile starts to spread across her face, and she nods her head emphatically, fixing me all the while with a look of intensifying joy that I understand to mean: ‘‘Let us take a moment to appreciate what an absolute banger this song is.’’ By the time Imogen Heap starts singing very plummily about choo-choo trains and aeroplanes and rockets to the stars, the song has worked its affective alchemy on my daughter. She raises a single plump arm above her head, swinging her little hips to some loose approximation of the beat. Once it’s over, she will, without fail, give me a quizzical look and say, ‘‘App-EE?’’ — which I take to mean: ‘‘Is there anything to be said for giving the old ‘Happy Song’ another spin?’’

The slightly unnerving fact about this song is that it was designed with this precise effect in mind. The London ad agency BETC, working on behalf of the baby-food behemoth Cow & Gate, wanted to engineer a piece of music to delight children between the ages of 6 months and 2 years. There’s a video on the agency’s website that documents the creation of ‘‘the world’s first song scientifically proven to make babies happy.’’ During a monthslong testing period, the team — which included both a developmental and a musical psychologist — asked British parents to tell them which sounds made their infants happiest. They then gathered recordings of the most popular of these sounds, which they tested on actual babies, measuring heart rates and facial expressions and vocalizations. The video includes footage of babies wired up to heart monitors, as scientists pore over complicated-looking data-modeling software. The findings of all this research were eventually handed over to Imogen Heap, whose resulting song incorporates many of the sounds — beeping horns, ringing bells, meowing cats — determined to be the most captivating to the most babies.

They way in which BETC tested what sounds were liked by children could be used in my design project. Nowadays, premium cars are equipped with monitoring tools such as cameras, microphones, and pressure detectors. Other tools such as heartbeat monitors could potentially be installed. With the amount of surveillance available to parents, an all-in-one tool that detects when a child is getting restless, upset, or sick could aid in diverting the worst disasters that come with driving with kids (such as backseat barfing or seat kicking).

Additionally, the visuals for the music video lend some key insights on designing for children. The colors are solid and not overly bright. The use of clay and felt in the characters and vehicles are familiar to children who have interacted with playroom materials and day-care collaging. The use of expressive, whimsical animals also invokes joy while being easily understood. "The Happy Song" by Imogen Heap is not only effective as a method for calming down children but also provides a blueprint for other designers aiming to appeal to kids.