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Chord progressions of 25,000 songs

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Re: Chord progressions of 25,000 songs

#101

Post by m-photonic »

mhax wrote: post #12
pcsanwald wrote: post #8

If anyone has interest in harmonic theory and why I/IV/V progressions are so pervasive, I highly recommend "The Harmonic Experience" by W.A. Mathieu. He really gets into the harmonic series, and how intervals are really low prime ratios. I read this book after being a professional musician for 15 years and it was an ear opening experience. there are lots of great singing exercises for really hearing the overtone seri…

That book looks really interesting - thanks for the recommendation. What still twists my melon about harmony is the Pythagorean Comma. Harmony equating to integer ratios seems so right... But the fact that a perfect 5th on a piano isn't really a perfect 5th troubles me at some existential level.

The Pythagorean comma is nothing to worry about -- it's tiny and more or less negligible. It's the syntonic comma that's the killer.

The fifths in equal temperament are completely fine, but the thirds are really quite a ways off from the harmonic 5/4 major third. I would recommend experimenting with the traditional meantone tuning system if you're interested in this -- it offers almost as much flexibility as equal temperament (with 6 adjacent keys on the circle of fifths being free of wolf intervals), and it lets you play with "real thirds".

Re: Chord progressions of 25,000 songs

#102

Post by azakai »

markbnj wrote: post #97
azakai wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was surprised though to see that in the data the 1-5-6-4 progression is not the most common. Maybe I'm reading it wrong? Looks like 1-4-* is more popular.

I think what the amusing videos linked above show is that 1-5-6-4 is very common in certain styles of music, especially modern pop. But when you consider music in its entirety then I'm not surprised to see it recede. So much folk and blues, for example, are built around completely different progressions.

Good point. I guess my musical experience is limited to the rock/pop side.

Re: Chord progressions of 25,000 songs

#103

Post by jpitz »

BurningFrog wrote: post #100
haberman wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't mean to be rude, but I'm not sure you understand the comma. It has nothing to do with combining types of instruments. It's a problem that exists even with a single instrument. The problem is that, even on a single instrument (say a piano), if you start on some note (say C0), going up seven octaves should land you on exactly the same note as going up twelve perfect fifths (C7). The problem is that the precise…

I understand that pianos have to pick a frequency for each key. I wonder if there is any effort in electronic instruments to produce "better" frequencies on the fly? I'll explain: On a piano hitting C+G plays something close to a perfect fifth. An electronic instrument could move the G slightly to produce a perfect fifth when that key combination is played.

You cant do that, without a large effort in music education or ensembles of all electronic instruments implementing this feature. Everyone else will be out of tune.

Edit: you could do it, but you'd better implement it on a feedback system that can re-tune in a hundred milliseconds or so.

Re: Chord progressions of 25,000 songs

#104

Post by KayEss »

codeulike wrote: post #83
snorkel wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see a good online reference, maybe I read this a guitar book somewhere, but essentially the tones for A, B, C, D, E, F, G notes were picked out by the ancient Greeks (who referred to them as Alpha, Beta, Gamma ... so on) In fact Pythagoras came up with a mathematical tuning system http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pythagoras#Musical_theories_and... The 7 natural notes are based on a 7-tone equal temperament (equal…

The 7 natural notes are based on a 7-tone equal temperament (equal tonal spacing), which gives you enough equal spacing between notes to make nice harmonies But they are not equally spaced. The tonal gap between A and B is twice as big as the gap between B and C, for example (look at the frequencies on a logarithmic scale).

The parent is being slightly confusing by bringing temperament into the discussion. They mean that the 12 notes are evenly spaced on an evenly tempered instrument, which means of course that you don't get the 'perfect' fourth or fifth you would get on a naturally tempered instrument (the frequencies are very slightly off).

Nearly all music we hear now is evenly tempered, but that is a pretty recent innovation.

Re: Chord progressions of 25,000 songs

#105

Post by kowdermeister »

rspeer wrote: post #78
kowdermeister wrote: post #24

"So for example, the transition 4->1->5->6 is one of the most popular ones" The graph does not show this or I'm misunderstanding something. The most popular looks like 1,4,1,5 Also, what does the double, triple numbers mean? 664, 66 in the fist column. I know some music theory, but the article's explanation is rather confusing.

He just said "one of the most popular", and 1 -> 5 -> 6 -> 4 is indeed the ridiculously common progression of "four chord rock". But if only the changes in chords are being notated, I bet 1, 4, 1, 5 comes from the 12-bar blues, which is even more widespread than four-chord rock. The 12 bars that dominated the 20th century could be notated as: 1, 1, 1, 1, 4, 4, 1, 1, 5, 4, 1, 5 And if you only notate the transitions:…

Thanks, this makes sense, however the visuals did not really show the common 4 chord song pattern.

Anyways, I mostly produce electronic music and this blues progression just gave me a good idea :)

Re: Chord progressions of 25,000 songs

#106

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

azakai wrote: post #65
kowdermeister wrote: post #24

"So for example, the transition 4->1->5->6 is one of the most popular ones" The graph does not show this or I'm misunderstanding something. The most popular looks like 1,4,1,5 Also, what does the double, triple numbers mean? 664, 66 in the fist column. I know some music theory, but the article's explanation is rather confusing.

> 1,4,1,5 That is indeed very popular, off the top of my head, "Free Falling" by Tom Petty. However, I am puzzled because 1,5,6,4 seems much more popular in my experience, and it doesn't seem that high in that data.

Top selling != widely used.

A table of chord progressions that took into account sales figures would look very different.

Re: Chord progressions of 25,000 songs

#109

Post by datAmit »

liminal wrote: post #39

I created a similar visualization of part of HookTheory's data: http://briancort.com/songviz/ At the time they didn't have an API, so I emailed them and they sent me a sample to work with. Would be interesting to see how it handles such a large amount of data. If you're interested in this sort of harmonic analysis, you might also like a little visualization I created of the harmonies within a chord: http://briancort.…

I'm the author of this article, and I signed up to ycombinator just to tell you I can't get over your visualization. It's just friggin top. Any chance you feel like explaining how you did it? mexindian@gmail.com

Re: Chord progressions of 25,000 songs

#110

Post by BurningFrog »

jpitz wrote: post #103
BurningFrog wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand that pianos have to pick a frequency for each key. I wonder if there is any effort in electronic instruments to produce "better" frequencies on the fly? I'll explain: On a piano hitting C+G plays something close to a perfect fifth. An electronic instrument could move the G slightly to produce a perfect fifth when that key combination is played.

You cant do that, without a large effort in music education or ensembles of all electronic instruments implementing this feature. Everyone else will be out of tune. Edit: you could do it, but you'd better implement it on a feedback system that can re-tune in a hundred milliseconds or so.

I'm just talking about an individual keyboard, though if all instruments are digital, which is pretty common these days, you could have a whole orchestra dynamically adjusting pitch to make "perfect" harmonies.

What I wonder is mostly if that would sound any better.

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