I analyzed the chords to 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found.

Post by colanderman » Tue, Jun 12, 2012, 7:52 PM UTC

msluyter wrote: post #35

colanderman wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He doesn't go nearly enough into depth to say anything surprising. That "C/Am" is by far the most common is not surprising at all; C major is the first key any music student learns. I wish he separated out the major keys from minor keys. It's easy to tell the difference; almost no-one writes pop music in the natural minor (which shares a key signature with the relative major), as it has no dominant fifth. Rather, mel…

I was going to write up pretty much the same analysis of the Em->X progression. I think you aptly covered it. Interestingly, though, as you say Em->C sounds relatively static, I bet you see a lot more C->Em than the reverse (which should suffer from the same problem), and I'm hard pressed to say why exactly.

Post by dfan » Tue, Jun 12, 2012, 7:53 PM UTC

dooq wrote: post #38

snorkel wrote: post #28

Reason: It's easier to play these chords on a 6 string guitar, which has been the dominant instrument of choice for pop song composers. The first C chord on a guitar is easy to hit with no finger twisting required. It's also easy to switch between the first C, Am, and G chord, you can even do it quickly and repeatedly while drunk as you can imagine many pop songs are written. The first F chord requires a little more…

Em is probably the very simplest guitar chord to play, only needing 2 fingers beside each other. Yet it doesn't come in at the top of the list. So I don't think your explanation is the dominant force here.

Post by dfan » Tue, Jun 12, 2012, 7:55 PM UTC

colanderman wrote: post #29

dfan wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The chord stuff is all perfectly reasonable (in pop music, that is; in a classical piece in the key of C you would have an Em going to an Am way more than to F, for example, and you'd see way more D chords). I don't buy that Eb/Cm is the third most common key in pop music, though. There's not a whole lot of pop music in minor keys, and Eb is a weird key to play guitar in.

Eb is a weird key to play guitar in. Van Halen did it all the time. (Tuning down a 1/2 step is not uncommon among heavier rock/heavy metal bands. I'm not entirely sure why though.)

Post by pbhjpbhj » Tue, Jun 12, 2012, 7:56 PM UTC

_delirium wrote: post #8

jerf wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem you'd have is a simple Markov chain would have trouble lining up the chord progressions on the larger intervals that chords line up on. You'd end up with a song that sounded sensible in the microscale but just sort of wandered around at weird intervals. And if you fix this... well... you'd end up with chord progressions essentially indistinguishable from the sampled pop music. But that would be an awfully…

That's the problem that David Cope had trying to do a Markov-chain-based recreation of Bach, in one of his many experiments in that endeavor; just wanders and doesn't really sound like much, even if all of the n-grams are legit, because it doesn't produce any kind of phrase structure. He ended up with sampling based on hierarchical context instead, iirc: http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/cope/experiments.htm

Post by mvkel » Tue, Jun 12, 2012, 7:57 PM UTC