The Police are responsible for the best song to listen to at any time of the day, according to a new study from a Danish University, which also looked at how the hour dictates our musical preferences.
There is endless variety when it comes to the types of music people like waking up to - from country and western to classical to grindcore.
Sting performs at the Bataclan. Photo: Boris Allin / Hans Lucas / AFP
Different strokes for different folks - but there is no debating what the best song is for any time of the day, according to researchers at Aarhus University in Denmark.
The university houses the Center for Music in the Brain, which is an interdisciplinary research centre focused on how music is processed in the brain.
For a study titled Diurnal fluctuations in musical preference, researchers analysed streaming data for nearly four million songs on Spotify to find out if there was a pattern to the types of songs people listen to over a 24-hour period.
Lead researcher Ole Adrian Heggli told Sunday Morning it started out as a lockdown project
'We were unable to come into the offices where we normally scan people's brains, so instead we had to find something else to look at and this data set from Spotify looked very interesting," he said.
Using the data, they found there were five blocks of time throughout the day where our song choices transition.
In the morning, we're more likely to listen to music with a slower pace - think 'Lovely Day' by Bill Withers - but as the day goes on, louder and faster songs dominate our choices.
"When we look at this data, we suggest that a song that's very much in the middle of everything, so to say, would be the best fit for something you could listen to all day," Heggli said.
And that perfect 'in the middle' song? It's The Police's 1983 smash hit 'Every Breath You Take'.
"It's a bit creepy, some of the lyrics ... but on the other hand, the music in itself is almost soothing, it just goes along," he said.
"I spent some time searching and looking for something like that and it's not easy to find something as middle of the pack as that song.
"It just has something a little bit magical about it, the straight rhythm and the drums and the rather pleasant melodic lines. So in a way, it might also be a bit unique."
But while it's a tune we can enjoy in the background, it still manages to avoid the curse of being elevator music - because Heggli says if something becomes too pleasant or too boring, it also becomes annoying.
"I think Every Breath You Take somehow manages to avoid that, it doesn't have any big surprises or anything, but it still has a little bit of something that captures a bit of your attention but not too much."
