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

blog.hooktheory.com

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

#141

Post by cpeterso »

mvkel wrote: post #50

Could you combine this data to algorithmically create the "most common song ever made"?

The Most Unwanted Song [1] and The Most Wanted Song [2] were a music experiment by artists Komar and Melamid. They survey people to find the most and least favorite musical instruments, genres, lyrical content. Komar and Melamid also created most and least wanted paintings by country.

[1] http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2008/04/a-scientific-at/

[2] http://www.wired.com/listening_post/2008/05/survey-produced/

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

#143

Post by cnanders »

horsehead wrote: post #54

What he's really talking about is chord progression (while he doesn't really say that, it's essentially the description of his first few paragraphs). Most university-level music classes discuss common chord progressions. As he notes, the I, IV and V chords are the most common to appear in a song. It's a great article, but I think he may have done a lot of work to find out something that is fairly common knowledge lol…

Hi horsehead, I don't know if you made it to the Music Editor part of the site http://www.hooktheory.com/editor but you can use the Music Editor to write songs using I V IV (type 1,5,4 on your keyboard) and such. One of the main goals of Hooktheory is to make more people aware of these basic elements of music theory and help people incorporate it into their musical endeavors.

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

#144

Post by sesimt »

I was hoping he had found the "Carlos Santana Secret Chord Progressions". No such luck. Did he have Frank Zappa's "Shut and Play Yer Guitar" in his collection?

Melodies are mildly interesting. It's harmonics that are an endless source of mystery.

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

#147

Post by djahng »

Yes, given that C major is the most popular key, it follows that C, F, and G are the most popular chords. That's called a I-IV-V chord progression, and is the basis for most blues, which rock (and subsequently pop) evolved out of.

Oh, and a G chord isn't any easier to play on a guitar than a C# chord.

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

#148

Post by dpkendal »

> Eb with 3 flats, for instance, is slightly (though not statistically significantly) more common than F with only 1 flat.

Ask any singer: F is the hardest key to sing in. Most people who have to sing in F unaccompanied will inevitably go flat over the course of the song without lots of practice.

I would have plotted the frequency of each chord relative to the key. (e.g., count chords as I/IV/V/ii/etc. instead of C/F/G/Dm) This automatically corrects for the relative popularity of different keys seen earlier in the post.

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

#149

Post by gbog »

I have a pessimistic theory on melodies that could be enforced by this study. Melodies are sequence of tones that can be remembered and sung. We have 7 or 12 or 5 tones, about the same number of distinguishable time patterns. Memory for melodies seem powerful, maybe allowing up to 40 elements in the sequence.

By pure combinations it seems the space of melodies is very large. But this space is in fact dramatically shrinked by the very strict relationships imposed on subsequent tones and the result could be that "we have finished exploring the space of interesting melodies", we are deemed to repeat ourselves, musical invention is something of the past.

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

#150

Post by fferen »

zopa wrote: post #135
fferen wrote: post #126

When I was young and learning music theory in piano lessons, one day I realized that literally half the songs on the radio used the chord progression "I V vi IV". This was a huge revelation to me! To my dismay, I couldn't find any evidence on the internet that anyone else had noticed this, until very recently I saw the "Four Chord Song" by Axis of Awesome ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pidokakU4I ). I was hoping t…

It's called a deceptive cadence -- that's the I V vi part. The IV is warmup for the V - I cadence that ends it all. "Deceptive" because vi is one note away from I, but in minor, not major. It's a well-known pattern; sorry the internet let you down.

Perhaps my google-fu was weak back then; searching now I see posts about it on several sites. Ha, there's even a Facebook group called "Stop using the I V vi IV chord progression" (http://www.facebook.com/pages/Stop-using-the-I-V-vi-IV-chord...).
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