Is there a reasonable explanation for the relative popularity of certain chords? If you’ve ever heard someone complain about the “four chord pop song”, this is what they are talking about. The A minor chord is the next most popular, but after that there is a significant drop off in use. Clicking on the above link will take you to the song’s entry in the database and show you that of the two sections that were analyzed (the chorus, and the verse), only one contains a C. “My Heart Will Go On” by Celine Dion is one of many examples in the database that exhibit this behavior. Interestingly, F and G actually show up in more chord progressions than C! C major is the tonal center and one might expect it to be ubiquitous, but it turns out to be pretty common to omit this chord in some sections of a song for effect. Chord use when all songs are transposed to the key of C majorĪs expected, C major is a very common chord for songs written in C (it’s the I chord in Roman numeral or Nashville Number notation), but F major and G major (the IV and V respectively) are used just as often. Below we’ve plotted the relative frequency that different chords occurred in descending order. Then we looked at the number of chord progressions that contained a given chord. We transposed every song in the database to be in the key of C to make them directly comparable. That way direct comparisons are possible and more illuminating. It’s much more interesting to look at songs written in a single common key. B♭ only has two flats but is way at the end of the popularity scale with only 4% of songs using that as the key. E♭ with three flats, for instance, is slightly (though not statistically significantly) more common than F with only one flat. After that there is a general trend favoring key signatures with less sharps and flats but this is not universal. So instead of answering this meaningless question, I’ll answer the slightly more interesting one of, what keys are most popular for the songs in the database? Most popular keys in musicĬ (and its relative minor, A) are the most common by far. That G chords are more popular than C♯ chords is likely only a reflection of the fact that it’s easier to play on the guitar and piano. A song written in the key of C♯ will have lots of C# chords in it, while a song written in G will probably have lots of G‘s. This seems like such a basic question, but the answer doesn’t actually tell us much because songs are written in different keys. Are some chords more commonly used than others? In this introductory post, I’ll look at a few interesting preliminary results, but we invite you to propose your own questions in the comments at the end of the article. We can use the information in the song database to answer all sorts of questions. The entries contain raw information about the chords and melody, while throwing out information about the arrangement and instrumentation. If you’re interested, you can check out the database here. This is an analysis of mainly “popular” music, not jazz or classical, so the results are not meant to be treated as universal. The genre and where they are taken from is important. At the moment the database of songs has over 1300 entries indexed. So, over the past 2 years we’ve been slowly and painstakingly building up a database of songs taken mainly from the billboard 100 and analyzing them 1 at a time. Just as important, the information is not in a format suitable for gathering statistics. Guitar tab websites have tons of information about the chord progressions that songs use, but the quality is not very high. To make quantitative statements about music you need to have data lots of it. For example, if a chord is found in a song, what can we say about the probability for what the next chord will be that comes after it? The Database Then we’ll begin to look at the relationship that different chords have with one another. First we’ll look at the relative popularity of different chords based on the frequency that they appear in the chord progressions of popular music. of popular songs to discover the answer to a few basic questions. In this article, we’ll look at the statistics gathered from 1300 choruses, verses, etc. Of course, if you play an instrument or want to write songs, being aware of these things is obviously of great practical importance. But knowing these patterns can give one a deeper more fundamental sense for how music works for me this makes listening to music a lot more interesting. For many people, listening to music elicits such an emotional response that the idea of dredging it for statistics and structure can seem odd or even misguided.
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