Re:I Analyzed Chord Progressions in 680k Songs
by cjohnson318 on Thursday April 17, 2025 @09:59PM
(#43724199)
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.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
Re:I Analyzed Chord Progressions in 680k Songs
by domenici2000 on Thursday April 17, 2025 @10:47PM
(#43724481)
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
by johnfn on Friday April 18, 2025 @01:50AM
(#43725377)
It's significantly worse than that. It's like saying the letter E is the most common letter in a corpus of text where most of the text has been ceasar-shifted.
Re:I Analyzed Chord Progressions in 680k Songs
by TheOtherHobbes on Thursday April 17, 2025 @10:18PM
(#43724307)
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.