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I analyzed chord progressions in 680k songs

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Re: I analyzed chord progressions in 680k songs

#31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two intervals?

A third, fourth, fifth, sixth... Triton... Those are intervals. I ask again, what's an interval between three pitches? Is it a triad? If it's so, than it's not a minor nitpick, OP is just being plain pedantic for the sake of it.

Two pitches played together is a dyad, three together is a triad. There may be words for four or more pitches together but I just call them chords. The term interval only makes sense to describe distance between two elements, whether pitches or two marks on a ruler.

Re: I analyzed chord progressions in 680k songs

#32

Listing the "most frequent chord" is a weird analysis, I'm more interested in the "most frequent key", or a transition matrix from one key to another, e.g., if I'm in F, what's the chance I go a fifth up to C, or a fourth down to Bb. Just telling me G is a popular chord doesn't do much.

The "haunting" riff in the Hounds song features a tritone, and it's a modal-ish progression - perhaps with hints of folk music lurking in the background.

You're not going to understand it by counting chords.

A lot of pop has these quirks. Even things that sound like I-IV-V or I-V-vi-IV bubble gum.

Slapping labels on the most obvious chords in a naive way misses them completely.

Re: I analyzed chord progressions in 680k songs

#33
post #3

Then there's the most complex pop song of all time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnRxTW8GxT8

The song is "Never Gonna Let You Go" by Sergio Mendes

The first few words of your comment, along with the sibling comment mentioning a "Rick", made me hesitant to click that link.

Re: I analyzed chord progressions in 680k songs

#34

Listing the "most frequent chord" is a weird analysis, I'm more interested in the "most frequent key", or a transition matrix from one key to another, e.g., if I'm in F, what's the chance I go a fifth up to C, or a fourth down to Bb. Just telling me G is a popular chord doesn't do much.

Exactly, this is useless. It's like saying the letter E is the most used letter in the world and Wheel of Fortune is your dataset.

Re: I analyzed chord progressions in 680k songs

#35

> An “interval” is a combination of two notes. Minor nitpick: it's a "dyad" that is a combination of two notes. An "interval" is the difference between two (or more) pitches. And just as you'd measure the space between your eyebrows using a ruler, you'd measure the interval between middle C and concert A using your ears. The bonus, however, is that our listening apparatus is already quantized to octaves-- if you hear…

It's not unusual to see dyads described as intervals. Technically they're different. But where "triad" is used all the time, "dyad" just isn't used much.

Intervals are basically the number of semitones between two pitches. Life would be easy if you could just say "seven semitones", but in the context of scales and keys the intervals have names - second, third, etc - with modifiers that are somewhat context dependent.

Example: an augmented fourth and a diminished fifth are both six semitones wide, but you'd use one name or the other depending on the key/scale and other details.

Intervals that span more than an octave are usually called [number of octaves] + [usual name].

Re: I analyzed chord progressions in 680k songs

#36
The way this analysis, and the original dataset were created, makes no sense. This is, in part, not the author's fault, since the original data [1, 2] is flawed.

First, the original data was constructed like this: "...The next step was to format the raw HTML files into the full chord progression of each song, collapsing repeating identical chords into a single chord (’A G G A’ became ’A G A’)..."

Already this makes no sense - the fact that a chord is repeated isn't some sort of typo (though maybe it is on UltimateGuitar). For example, a blues might have a progression C7 F7 C7 C7 - the fact that C7 is repeated is part of the blues form. See song 225 from the dataset, which is a blues:

A7 D7 A7 D7 A7 E7 D7 A7

Should really be:

A7 D7 A7 A7 D7 D7 A7 A7 E7 D7 A7 A7

With these omissions, it's a lot harder to understand the underlying harmony of these songs.

The second problem is that we don't really analyze songs so much by the chords themselves, but the relationships between chords. A next step would be to convert each song from chords to roman numerals so we can understand common patterns of how songs are constructed. Maybe a weekend project.

[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.22046 [2] https://huggingface.co/datasets/ailsntua/Chordonomicon/blob/...

Re: I analyzed chord progressions in 680k songs

#37
post #4

I find the analysis interesting in terms of a hobby project, but I'd be careful extrapolating too much out of this. 680k is quite the sample size, but my issue lies within the myopic selection of one instrument and the issues that arise from the platform of Ultimate Guitar. 1. I am curious, how many of the 680k songs are unique? It is rather uncommon for massively successful songs to only have one version of tabs out…

I think Ultimate Guitar has a lot to do with this. Sure, G is probably the most popular chord, but there are a _lot_ of chord sheets that are wrong or incomplete. If someone were to play many of these songs as charted on UG it would sound unrecognizable. Kind of invalidates the analysis IMHO

And how many charts call for a capo to be used so the performer is using key of G chord shapes but actually playing a different key entirely?

Re: I analyzed chord progressions in 680k songs

#38

> An “interval” is a combination of two notes. Minor nitpick: it's a "dyad" that is a combination of two notes. An "interval" is the difference between two (or more) pitches. And just as you'd measure the space between your eyebrows using a ruler, you'd measure the interval between middle C and concert A using your ears. The bonus, however, is that our listening apparatus is already quantized to octaves-- if you hear…

That's new for me. What's an interval between three pitches called?

So when you've got an interval you usually mean two sounds that are separated in time. So like the iconic Jaws Melody dun-dan-dun-dan-dun-dan, those notes are separated by an interval that could be called one semitone, 100 cents, or a minor second, depending on who is talking.

Or in “Oh when the Saints Go Marching In,” the ‘Oh-when’ interval is two tones (four semitones), 400¢, or a major third, the ‘when-the’ interval is another minor second, and the ‘the-Saints’ interval is one tone or a major second. Adding those up we find out that “oh-Saints,” if you just omit the other words, is 700¢ or a “perfect fifth”, so “saints-Go” is a descending perfect fifth, -700¢.

Now you can play all four notes at the same time and you would still refer to these distances between the notes as intervals, but nobody is likely to describe this sound as a bunch of intervals. It is a “I(add 4) chord” in that context and the +100¢ interval between the major third and the perfect fourth is what gives it its spiciness.

So then you have to clarify whether you mean that we are playing one note first and then two notes together second, or are we playing all three notes at the same time, or are we playing all three notes separately.

If it's one and then two, or two then one, the higher note of the dyad will sound like the melody usually, and you'll reckon the interval between those two. People who have really well trained musical ears, instead hear the shift on the lowest note, but it requires training.

If you mean that all three are separated by time, then it's a melody. In this case these first four notes of “Oh When the Saints Go Marching In” would perhaps be described maybe as an arpeggiated major chord with a passing tone, same as I said earlier as “I(add 4).” I'm not actually 100% sure if that's the right use of the term passing tone or whether passing tones have to lie outside your scale or something.

If the three notes are played at the same time, that's a chord, specifically it's a triad chord. You might talk about the stacked intervals in that chord, a major chord stacks a minor third on a major third, a minor chord stacks a major third on a minor third, stacking major on major is augmented, stacking minor on minor is diminished, and there are suspended chords where you don't play either third, so sus2 stacks a fourth atop a second and sus4 stacks a second atop a fourth. So a lot of those have their own names, and some of those names get weird (like to stack a fourth on a fourth you might say “Csus4/G,” which treats the lowest note G as if it were the highest note but someone decided to drop it down an octave).

Re: I analyzed chord progressions in 680k songs

#39
If you're interested in more relative chord progression analysis, check out Hooktheory (I'm not affiliated but I think love their two books / apps):

https://www.hooktheory.com/theorytab/index

It's "just" 32K songs, but you can see the top chord progressions:

https://www.hooktheory.com/theorytab/common-chord-progressio...

And see which songs follow any chord progression you choose (either absolute or relative chords):

https://www.hooktheory.com/trends

Re: I analyzed chord progressions in 680k songs

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A third, fourth, fifth, sixth... Triton... Those are intervals. I ask again, what's an interval between three pitches? Is it a triad? If it's so, than it's not a minor nitpick, OP is just being plain pedantic for the sake of it.

"Interval between three pitches" is not a well-defined concept, just like "distance between three points" isn't. You need additional qualifiers to describe what you mean by that. Maybe you want the shortest path between them, or maybe you want a triangle. In any case, using a term like that makes it seem like you're confused with the terminology.

They are questioning jancsika's assertion at the top of the thread that an interval can somehow contain more than two pitches:

> An "interval" is the difference between two (or more) pitches.

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