leonardcohenforum.com

i suspect leonard is included in the playlists - haven't had time to check.
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...British mental health charity SANE has teamed up with Feeling Gloomy & Spotify to harness the power of music to lift everyone’s spirits and encourage people to connect more with friends and family.

Blue Mood Month launches January 16th and will run throughout 2012 as part of SANE’s 25th Anniversary Black Dog Campaign...

...SANE and Feeling Gloomy have asked their celebrity friends – such as Graham Norton, Ruby Wax, Adam Ant and Beverley Knight – and supporters to create playlists of their favourite ‘sad songs that make you happy’ – ones that really lifted their mood when they were down. As promoter Carl Hill of Feeling Gloomy says, “Oddly, sad songs can pick you up when you are at your lowest. Perhaps it’s knowing that someone else at some point has felt like you have, or maybe it is just cathartic in itself”...

http://www.looktothestars.org/news/7663 ... mood-month

http://www.sane.org.uk/what_we_do/blue_mood

Thanks so much for these links. I'm looking forward to this.

Actually...seems we here in Canada are out of luck on this one...Spotify is not available here.

Why listening to music can make you as fit as a fiddle: It can help your body fight infection and recover after ops

Researchers have found that classical music can lower blood pressure

It improved both short-term and long-term memory in people with dementia

Reduced pain for patients having hernia surgery under general anaesthetic...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/artic ... r-ops.html

sacconi quartet.

not literally heartstopping, i hope.

...the performance set out to privide an extra dimension to the already profound experience of Beethoven's Op. 132, through interactive lighting and an interactive heart rate monitor. The monitor, a beautifully crafted combination of wood and advanced electronics and described as a 'chestahedron', gave a continuous link to the heart rate of one of the Sacconis, beating in time with the players heart.

Surprisingly perhaps, the heart rates don't follow the tempo of the music. As Hannah says during 'Music Matters', 'It is also maybe simplistic to imagine that always when we're playing slow music that out hearts are going to be correlating in a slow fashion. I think the central movement is a moment of repose, a moment of calm; but also a moment where maybe life and death make sense as well, and so it's maybe the most heightened bit emotionally'...

http://www.classicfm.com/concerts-event ... oven-dark/#

http://www.sacconi.com/news