I'm amused by the fact that this person doesn't seem to know that chords per se - and the analysis of them - is practically useless because they can and actually do vary from version to version of the same song. The thing that matters is how the chords are related (modes and progressions).
Knowledge of rudimentary music theory makes this link upsetting in what it's missing. It looks at data in the wrong way.
I hope that other articles on HN don't fall apart like this if you know a little about the subject.
Nice post, I'm looking forward for the next one. Meanwhile I'll give my 2 cents. The main problem in analyzing tonal music is that we mainly listen to relations between chords. For instance, in the following progression in C major, A major functions as a dominant of D (D is the dominant of G and G is the dominant of C): C A D G C. OTOH, in the following progression the same A is the subdominant of E: E A B E. This me…
Doesn't he allow for this by normalising all songs to the key of C before doing the analysis?
There's a great Youtube video of three guys playing many pop songs with the same three or four chords. I'm behind a firewall now or I would post the link.
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…
Your thinking is backwards here. It's not that the music is written like this because it is played on a guitar, it is the guitar that was created to make simple music easy to play.
This is the reason why the guitar strings have the tuning they have, and not any of the million other possible combinations.
I find it hard to believe that D major wasn't one of the more common chords to follow and E minor.
Why would the II chord follow iii? Can you cite some examples of that? The only pop/rock use of II that I can think of is as a turn to drive II7 -> V7 -> I.
Exactly. D Major chord is a V/V in C Major, which has only a couple of common uses in popular music according to the Hooktheory database. V/V -> V7 -> I is one common one. Another is a substitution for ii, like: I -> V/V -> IV -> V, see John mayer, Kelly Clarkson, Kenny Chesney etc.
The reason people fall back to the I IV V and VI chords (C F G and Am in the key of C) is that going between them creates a false sense of forward motion in the listener without actually going anywhere. Moving from the IV to V creates tension that can be built up and released by resolving to the I, or increased by going to the VI and resolved to the IV. Any combination of those pretty much sounds "good". Variations add the II (Dm) in place of the V or in between the IV and V, or add the III on the way to the IV. It's really simple, and made even simpler by power chords because you don't even have to move your hand shape to play entire songs on rhythm. Leads can then switch between major scale phrases and pentatonic (aka blues) phrases of the minor of whatever key is being played in, (so Am blues over C) and almost anything they do sounds good to the average listener. In the end, you only have to keep their attention for ~40 seconds between hooks and just crutch on the catchy chorus and you've got a hit. But if you analyze most popular forms of music, the above is at their core anyway. It's just more bare bones in modern pop and rock music.
Nice post, I'm looking forward for the next one. Meanwhile I'll give my 2 cents. The main problem in analyzing tonal music is that we mainly listen to relations between chords. For instance, in the following progression in C major, A major functions as a dominant of D (D is the dominant of G and G is the dominant of C): C A D G C. OTOH, in the following progression the same A is the subdominant of E: E A B E. This me…
Doesn't he allow for this by normalising all songs to the key of C before doing the analysis?
Right, all of the songs were normalized to C, which exactly the point. At Hooktheory.com you can examine all of the songs in relative notation (i.e. I IV V in place of C F G) which makes it easier to compare chord progressions without having to bother with their respective keys.
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…
Very good analysis. I wasn't even going to comment, since my reaction (personal impression) to the article was "too bad there might be 2 of the 1300 songs that have chords that don't sound like crap" - since they all do, there might be a couple of dozen well-orchestrated popular songs over the last several decades. (I should add that, despite this fact, I do avidly listen to popular songs and don't have a problem. I…
That is a fair critique of the article. The vast majority of the songs that came into the analysis were in fact billboard top 100 so that naturally filters out songs with chords that might sound bad (chords that as a rule are not built off of the major scale the song uses). What we found most interesting, however, was that there are certain patterns that really do show up. The one that was most striking, and that we pointed out in the article, is that the iii chord is almost always followed by IV or vi in pop music. There were similar trends for other some of the other chords that we'll be posting in a later article.
What I'd like to see is a plot of the number of chords used in a song versus time. Possibly even broken down by genre, or correlated to other qualities (sex of singer) et cetera. If you start at the 1950s, you'll see very simple rock songs; your classic three-chord rock songs. As you hit the 1960s you'll see more complexity; The Beatles, for instance, had more harmonic complexity than what had come before, which cont…
Honestly, I wouldn't mind hearing more of your discussion about art music and the breakdown of harmony.