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Analyzing the chords of 1300 popular songs for patterns
- jermaustin1 8y agoNow how long before an AI writes the PERFECT song?
- leesec 8y agoNo such thing. But AI will definitely write pleasing music in the next 10 years~.
- sbarker 8y agoDepending on pleasing, but for me they have already for the last 7 years. https://www.jukedeck.com/about https://www.jukedeck.com/about
- SketchySeaBeast 8y agoWait a second, then what the hell is a Skrillex?
- coverband 8y agoSci-fi story of note: "The Ultimate Melody" by Arthur C. Clarke[0], from 1957. [0] https://archive.org/stream/1957-02_IF#page/n71/mode/2up https://archive.org/stream/1957-02_IF#page/n71/mode/2up
- cpeterso 8y agoThanks! I hadn't seen that Arthur C. Clarke story before. It reminds me of Alfred Bester's 1953 novel The Demolished Man: a murderer pays someone to write a catchy jingle (earworm) for him that can block psychics from reading his murderous thoughts.
- cordonbleu 8y agoi think we may also see the "perfect" ad jingle or notification tone, this could also be used for consumer conditioning for examle; playing a likeable sweet sound when consumer does something good [clicks on ad] or a sour tone when doing "bad" like blocking an ad or popup.
- femto113 8y agoDavid Cope (a professor at the college I went to) started working on that idea back in the early 80s, calling it "Musical Intelligence". His approach got the most attention for its ability to write new classical works that accurately mimicked the style of famous composers. http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/experiments.htm http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/experiments.htm
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- cpeterso 8y agoThere's already an instruction manual for writing pop hits: The KLF's The Manual (How to Have a Number One the Easy Way) is a (tongue-in-cheek) step by step guide to achieving a No.1 single with no money or musical skills. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Manual
- taneq 8y agoAnd of course don't forget Pop Music 101 for an updated look: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kpWkV7IBUw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kpWkV7IBUw
- white-flame 8y agoNever, because "perfect" in terms of entertainment, "wow" factor, and endearment is a moving target and a product of the times. If things get overplayed, they get stale. So we constantly get new songs that reuse the same familiarity in different ways, but not literally the same replayed song.
- mpalmer 8y ago> 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!
- leetcrew 8y agoalso what the hell. how are you supposed to write all your songs without using the dominant chord of your key?
- cnanders 8y agoThere was a typo in the post that has been corrected. It now reads “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 A minor or F major after the E minor. For the songs in the database, 93% of the time one of these two chords came next!”
- leetcrew 8y agoty for the response, makes a lot more sense now.
- cnanders 8y agoco-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?
- tareqak 8y ago
- bencollier49 8y agoThe 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.
- lightbyte 8y agoThey did not use data from guitar tabs: >Guitar tab websites have tons of information about the chord progressions that songs use, but the quality is not very high. >So, over the past 2 years we’ve been slowly and painstakingly building up a database of songs taken mainly from the billboard 100 and analyzing them 1 at a time.
- SomeHacker44 8y agoI came to say basically the same thing. Seems like a basic statistical analysis of songs. Anyone who has composed or even played music will find no surprises here (unless you solely loved on atonal 20th century stuff). However, the author clearly has knowledge of music theory, so I fully fail to appreciate the purpose of the article.
- rumcajz 8y agoOTOH, I was quite surprised that E minor is used more (17%) than E major (10%) in popular music. In classical music the latter is quite common and the former is very rare.
- lowercased 8y agoWith GFC being most popular, I'd expect Em more, because it more fits with those major ones. Emin vs Emaj - my gut would say Emin is going to fit in with keyboard/piano stuff easier, and there's more of that type music overall. When I think Emaj, I think guitar stuff (EAD stuff), and there's been less of that overall compared with keyboard-based music.
- sathackr 8y agoObligatory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I (Axis of Awesome, Four Chord Song)
- saurik 8y agoWhich I guess means I have to leave the obligatory https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdxkVQy7QLM (Rob Paravonian's Pachelbel's Rant). :(
- ahoy 8y ago(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 8y agoThey 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.
- liminal 8y agoWhen 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/
- cabaalis 8y agoIt 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!
- golergka 8y agoHooktheory 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 8y agoIt 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
- scrumper 8y agoI 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!
- colechristensen 8y agoThe author probably wasn't familiar with how it is normally done with roman numerals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numeral_analysis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numeral_analysis
- peterlk 8y agoThis is obviously not true. They use Roman numerals in the article and in follow-on articles
- peterlk 8y agoI 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 8y agoYou 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.
- zorga 8y agoThat would only work for songs that always stay in key, many don't. Normalizing to C is a better approach.
- baddox 8y ago
- cubano 8y agoI 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.
- thanatropism 8y agoThe 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 :)
- foobaw 8y agoSurprised to not see more jazz chords like #9#5.
- olivermarks 8y agoCircle of 5ths is fundamental to song structure, probability is largely based on that
- chrisweekly 8y agoprobability -> probably :)
- chrisweekly 8y agoFTR, they're completely different words. Aiming for clarity, not pedantry.
- olivermarks 8y agoI meant probability and not 'probably'
- tunesmith 8y agoD 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.
- empthought 8y agoTwenty-five years ago. As much time separates now from “Kiss from a Rose” as separates “Kiss from a Rose” from the Beatles’ “Come Together.”
- puranjay 8y agoI'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
- data_science 8y agoThis 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.
- mmmmmmmmm 8y agoEasy there killer.
- chosenbreed37 8y ago> 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 :-)
- richardhod 8y ago(2012)
- mrcactu5 8y agoFlow Machines is an AI music generator http://www.flow-machines.com/ http://www.flow-machines.com/
- adamnemecek 8y agoI’ve been working on an IDE for music, check it out http://ngrid.io http://ngrid.io
- person_of_color 8y agoAny "Music Theory" for hackers publications, similar to the ones available on DSP?
- johan_larson 8y agoI have to believe scholars who study pop music did this research decades ago, though probably by hand.
- tabtab 8y agoI 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 8y agoGenerating “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 8y agoI 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.
- ScottBurson 8y agoWhat 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 8y agoJust 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.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- andybak 8y agoFirst 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.
- iambateman 8y agoThe 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 8y agoI think you mean I-IV-vi-V.