davec

we recently converted Hookpad, our chord and melody sketchpad for teaching and writing music, to a PWA. Prior to being a PWA users often had to redownload samples each time they visited the site, and now they only have to download a sample once (our AWS bill has gotten smaller as a result). It was also really nice to suddenly be able to install the app locally and be able to use it without an internet connection.

Getting all that capability just by adding a manifest file and a service worker was pretty cool. I won't comment on the pros and cons of just releasing a native app (we are in a lot of schools that prefer a web interface so this made sense for us), but we are very happy with the added functionality and don't see any downsides.

https://hookpad.hooktheory.com

We completely rebuilt this in React/Redux from a previous version based in Flash. We think it does some amazing things with the Web Audio API.

Some more info about what we are trying to do:

http://www.hooktheory.com/blog/introducing-hookpad-2-a-music...

Ask and you shall receive. Hooktheory's Trends tool lets you see and hear all the chord progressions of the individual songs used here. As mentioned in the article, this analysis actually used our free API for accessing our chord progression database (I'm one of the creators of the site).

http://www.hooktheory.com/trends

Sorry. We used to have a way to show more than the top 10, but it seems to have been disappeared. I'll make sure that gets added back to make browsing easier.

You can see the more recent and most popular analyses at www.hooktheory.com/analysis

This is something we considered.

Part of the problem is that sometimes when people analyze a section of a song, they include a pick up, etc. Other times the song doesn't have a strong resolution, so it's not clear where a progression begins or ends.

We thought this was the best compromise for now. The tool will show you all songs that start with the progression, as well as songs that use the progression in a phase shifted manner (which is also interesting).

I disagree that a classically trained musician wouldn't be surprised at the predominance of IV -> I in popular music. Plagal cadences aren't nearly as common as V->I in the common practice period, and when it is used, the pull of IV to I isn't nearly as strong. The resolution is much weaker.

don't forget a lot of money and promotion. I think that's at least half

That'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.