
Analyzing the chords of 1300 popular songs for patterns - ohjeez
http://www.hooktheory.com/blog/i-analyzed-the-chords-of-1300-popular-songs-for-patterns-this-is-what-i-found/
======
liminal
When I first saw that blog post I was inspired to create a visualization of
some of the data. You can use it to explore the chord progressions and play
them in the browser:

[https://briancort.com/songviz/](https://briancort.com/songviz/)

I also made a visualization to explore chord harmonies:

[https://briancort.com/chordviz/](https://briancort.com/chordviz/)

~~~
svantana
Very nice! Did you get the chord data from hooktheory or somewhere else? It
seems to me that scraping is the name of the game in this field, but it would
be nice if there was some "standard" dataset to work with.

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thanatropism
The Netflix show "1983" keeps insinuating this tense chord at closing credits
(and more subtly as nondiegetic background). It seemed to resolve, or rather
stumble into a disonance as if just the exact wrong note was played.

It was driving me mad -- a few times I caught myself during work hours trying
to reproduce it from memory in MuseScore. It was finally played fully in the
last episode, and the aha moment was that what appeared to be a minor chord
before The Chord was a major seventh and the progression resolved neatly. What
it seems to have been done is to play multiple variants that played component
notes differently at different velocities (the strength with which you hit a
piano key). It's like it moved by aporias, each time leading you into a
different impasse. The show's plot is sort of like that too.

This is to say -- there's more to music than chord progressions, and there's
more to chord progressions than chords :)

------
bencollier49
The feels like it was written by someone who didn't understand music theory,
but the author does discuss the 4th and 5th chords. And yet the story is
written as if he didn't expect to find that they show up everywhere.

Still, don't want to be too negative, it's very interesting that he used data
from guitar chord websites, that's a clever data source.

~~~
pier25
Yes, after all I-IV-V is the most common chord progression.

It would have been nice if the author also had analyzed chord progressions
instead of single chords.

Who knows how many Pachelbel's progressions he would have found! :)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM)

~~~
Terretta
> _would have been nice if the author also had analyzed chord progressions
> instead of single chords_

Last heading in this first section:

 _“If a song happens to use a particular chord, what chord is most likely to
come next?”_

~~~
pier25
Yeah, but that is not a complete chord progression.

I meant something like I-V-vi-iii-IV-I-IV-V

------
mpalmer
> If you write a song in C with an E minor in it, you should probably think
> very hard if you want to put a chord that is anything other than an A minor
> chord or an F major chord.

God forbid your song deviates from the most 1300 most popular songs!

~~~
cnanders
co-founder of Hooktheory here. When this article was published (2012), it was
based on the first 1300 songs in the library
[[https://www.hooktheory.com/theorytab](https://www.hooktheory.com/theorytab)].
At that time, the two most common chords after E minor for songs in the key of
C major were F major (59% of the time) and A minor (34% of the time). The
library now has about 12k songs and the percentages have changed. Still the
same two chords, but now F major (IV) is only about 34% of the time, and A
minor (vi) is about 24% of the time. Here is an updated plot of the most
common chords after E minor for songs in the key of C major
[https://imgur.com/a/lBfVK0X](https://imgur.com/a/lBfVK0X)?

~~~
mpalmer
I was responding more to what I saw as the rather blunt application of
statistics to the songwriting process. Admittedly I'm new to your site, but
I'm curious about the theory.

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golergka
Hooktheory is about the best songwriting tool I've ever used, delighted to see
this on HN. Their Hookpad software is completely magical and helps not only to
write chord progressions, but to learn music theory as well.

~~~
spatulon
It doesn't seem well-known, but their daily ear-training challenge is really
excellent, at least for a beginner like me.

[https://www.hooktheory.com/ear-training](https://www.hooktheory.com/ear-
training)

~~~
pingiun
Unfortunately this is flash based :(

~~~
golergka
They have ported the main software to HTML5 quite a while ago, but a lot of
smaller things (like demos in the blog post series in the original posts) are
lost in Flash, unfortunately.

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scrumper
I found it a bit weird to "normalize" everything back to C. Couldn't just use
numbers instead? (To make it friendlier for those less comfortable with that,
put a hover over to show what that means in each key at each point in your
analysis.)

Good call on the guitar tab sites being wrong almost all the time!

~~~
peterlk
I think the reason to not use roman numerals is because what Roman numeral
would you use for B major. B diminished is IV, but B major is not in the C
scale, neither is B minor or B augmented, or B sus2 or Bsus4. It makes sense
to write it all normalized to the key of C because songs may borrow chords
from other keys in similar ways

~~~
Geimfari
You use uppercase Roman numerals to indicate a major chord. So it is then easy
to distinguish between vii⁰ and VII and is the standard way in music theory.

------
iambateman
The article was ok, but check out HookTheory’s chord progression visualizer:

[https://www.hooktheory.com/trends](https://www.hooktheory.com/trends)

It’s fun to play with and has helped me find songs to hear how the same
progressions can be different across different songs. Personal favorite
progression is I-IV-VI-V...which is shared by “Whatya Want from Me” by Adam
Lambert and “Concerning Hobbits”.

~~~
onorton
I think you mean I-IV-vi-V.

------
cabaalis
It seems just about everything just arranges 1,4,5,minor 6. I've played music
for over 20 years, it seems the Nashville Number System works for almost
everyone!

------
tabtab
I actually did something similar but less formal for an automated-composer
experiment. I took several dozen tunes I liked, and extracted out the most
common chord progressions found in them.

I normalized it such that "key" was irrelalent because transposed keys are
generally considered the same such that I was more concerned about the
relative relationship between chords per song.

After the analysis gave me my Markov-chain-like progression list, I randomly
generated a some test tunes. While most of the results were agreeable, some I
didn't like, and ended up trimming the offending chords out of my list.

I realized I probably would need to analyze 3 levels of progressions -- a
moving window of A-to-B-to-C -- to get better results, or at least better
tests. I never finished that step.

But I should point out that I was interested in generating progressions that
sounded good to _me_. Ultimately I want to make tunes that I like even if I
use a computer to help. That means I can use manual adjustments and/or
backtracking the chain generation when needed. Therefore, going 3 levels was
probably overkill. Leaving it at 2 gives me "happy accidents" anyhow.

~~~
maroonblazer
Generating “happy accidents” are my primary interest when it comes to using
ML/AI for music composition. 8 times out of 10 I can generate my own but I’d
love to be able to cover that last 20%. This seems like a sweet spot for
current technology.

Any chance you’ll open source your approach?

~~~
tabtab
I find diminishing returns. If I try to add logic and gizmos to get it to
automatically be closer to my ideal, it just complicates things and would
probably take 10x longer to "finish". Thus, a "perfect" composer may be do-
able, but the end result would be a Swiss-Army Spruce Goose. That is if the
sheer complexity doesn't introduce bugs to make it worse.

As far as open-sourcing it, I'd have to clean it up to be presentable to
humans-that-are-not-me, being it's a ball of ad-hoc experiments.

------
andybak
First time I've seen a website need Flash in quite a while. I can't even
remember if there's a sane way to install it any longer.

------
cubano
I just happened to see this article/website while listening to a "70s hits"
channel at the hotel I'm staying.

Have you ever considered analyzing the hit progressions thru time, to see if
and how our tastes change?

Also, using a self-generated formula that a hit song is probably 25% root
progression, 25% melody over that progression (the hooks), and 50% lyrical
content...I wonder if some attempt at integrating all three of those items
could yield fruitful, interesting results.

Great work, BTW...as a lifelong musician/songwriter, I enjoy sites like yours
to help gain a deeper understanding about how professionals manipulate the
sonic palette to craft songs and interesting melodies.

------
sathackr
Obligatory
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I)
(Axis of Awesome, Four Chord Song)

~~~
ahoy
(I love this video, it's very funny)

I think it's important to be clear that a song is so much more than just the
chords. Axis uses a few "tricks" to get things to sound the same:

\- strip away everything except the chords & play them all on the same
instrument \- shift all the songs into the same key \- play all the songs at
the same tempo

It's a funny exercise that, but it's a bit like saying all cars are the same
because they have the same basic structure. Obviously there's a difference
between a Camry and a Bugatti.

~~~
baddox
They also shift the progression by one measure so that they can include all
the vi-IV-I-V songs. “Check out how many songs use these two chord
progressions” just never caught on as a title.

------
ScottBurson
_What stands out here, is that IV → I (F to C) is not only normal, it actually
shows up just as often as V → I (G to C)._

Amen!

~~~
DavidPiper
Just leaving a note here so you know someone got the reference :)

Having grown up on Billy Joel (among others), I actually tend to prefer the
sound of IV -> I over V -> I. Glad to see the plagal is equally represented.

------
adamnemecek
I’ve been working on an IDE for music, check it out
[http://ngrid.io](http://ngrid.io)

------
tunesmith
D major, E major, and A major are the V of V (G), the V of vi (a), and the V
of ii (d) respectively. So that's why they are more common than other random
non-diatonic major chords.

Also I wouldn't be surprised if Ab major was the next most common chord. 'I'
near a flat-VII and a flat-VI is pretty common. Like Kiss From A Rose from a
few years back.

~~~
puranjay
I've seen the Ab chord show up so much more in music after the '90s. The Dm Ab
F combination in particular.

EDM music just takes all these chords and adds a 7th to it

------
olivermarks
Circle of 5ths is fundamental to song structure, probability is largely based
on that

~~~
chrisweekly
probability -> probably

:)

~~~
chrisweekly
FTR, they're completely different words. Aiming for clarity, not pedantry.

------
mrcactu5
Flow Machines is an AI music generator [http://www.flow-
machines.com/](http://www.flow-machines.com/)

------
jermaustin1
Now how long before an AI writes the PERFECT song?

~~~
leesec
No such thing. But AI will definitely write pleasing music in the next 10
years~.

~~~
sbarker
Depending on pleasing, but for me they have already for the last 7 years.
[https://www.jukedeck.com/about](https://www.jukedeck.com/about)

------
johan_larson
I have to believe scholars who study pop music did this research decades ago,
though probably by hand.

------
person_of_color
Any "Music Theory" for hackers publications, similar to the ones available on
DSP?

------
foobaw
Surprised to not see more jazz chords like #9#5.

------
richardhod
(2012)

------
data_science
This is the best part about data science, that should really just jump right
out at you, and if it doesn't then please, please, please never try to apply
data science to anything by yourself, because you will be sealing people into
tombs of misery.

The point here, is that if you look at 1,300 shitty songs, and try to learn
about what music is, with those as your example, you are setting yourself up
to just make more terrible music.

Maybe a more readily tangible example is: if you were to try and learn about
how to create fake dating profile images, but only learned with profile pics
of ugly people, then all of your fake dating profiles will probably be
unattractive, and they'll never fetch a second look, much less dates.

I mean, this guy cites:

    
    
      Celine Dion 
      Taylor Swift
      Pharrell Williams
      Adele
      Bruno Mars
      3 Doors Down
      Green Day
      Lady Gaga
      Gorillaz
      Linkin Park
      Avril Lavigne
      Daft Punk
    

This _tripe_ (and I _mean_ tripe) has been forced down my throat for decades,
and it _still_ is incredibly terrible.

I don't ever want to learn anything about music from _this_ music. It's awful.
It all needs to burn. And if you locked me in a room with AI that learned how
to create music with these examples as it's template, I'd probably climb the
walls and eventually commit suicide. I mean, I'm half way there as it is, and
yes, I do blame this kind of music, at least in part.

~~~
chosenbreed37
> I mean, this guy cites:

Well...you seem to know a lot about artists whose music you abhor...I'm
curious to see what artists/genres you'd recommend :-)

