I analyzed the chords to 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found.
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Re: I analyzed the chords to 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found.
#2Very interesting! Although, for most common chords chart, I think that instead of simply counting the number of times a chord appears, you should have also considered the duration of that chord in the song.
Didn't Pandora radio did the same analysis for its recommendation engine?
Re: I analyzed the chords to 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found.
#3That's a good recommendation. I have a feeling it wouldn't change the results much for pop songs.
I know Pandora has done some analysis like this for their database, but I thought it was limited to things like major or minor tonality, upbeat tempo, etc. and didn't delve as much into the nitty gritty harmony. One reason for this might be that these patterns are so universal (spanning lots of genres), that it might not be too helpful for determining what types of music people like. I could be wrong about this though.
Re: I analyzed the chords to 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found.
#4Hmm, one could also use a Markov chain on those 1300 chord progressions....
Re: I analyzed the chords to 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found.
#5Hmm, one could also use a Markov chain on those 1300 chord progressions....
I thought of this too while I was reading, but I think the results would be pretty bland.
Re: I analyzed the chords to 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found.
#6Hmm, one could also use a Markov chain on those 1300 chord progressions....
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 complex way to obtain results that you could just as easily do by hand. :) In fact many people can just vamp those chord progressions in real time if you don't expect too much creativity.
Re: I analyzed the chords to 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found.
#7How does this compare to what Music Theory says about chords and chord progressions? Any Music Theory experts/aficionados around? I've unfortunately forgotten most of what I learned in my one class on it.
Re: I analyzed the chords to 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found.
#8Hmm, one could also use a Markov chain on those 1300 chord progressions....
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
Re: I analyzed the chords to 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found.
#9Well, that went down fast.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...
Re: I analyzed the chords to 1300 popular songs for patterns. This is what I found.
#10For those interested in a far deeper analysis of music structure, as well as exploring the possibility of computer composition and creativity, see the work of David Cope: http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Models-Musical-Creativity-Dav...