I analyzed chord progressions in 680k songs
150 comments
·April 17, 2025huimang
pfisherman
Agreed on chord numbers and progression being the analysis that should have been done. For example, blues is mostly defined by a 1-4-5 progression and the ol 2-5-1 is pretty ubiquitous across time and genre.
Also, I think disappearance of 7th chords - major, minor, or dominant - is vastly overstated. Keep in mind that these are from guitar tabs so likely ignoring chord inversion / voicing / substitution taking placw to simplify notation. For example a B minor triad can be substituted for a Gmaj7.
Bm triad = B,D,F#
Gmaj7 = G,B,D,F#
Or if you want to be fancy a Bb/Gm can work as either Bbmaj7 or C7 depending on where you put it in a progression.
pclmulqdq
As you have suggested, it has also become common to use patterns like Bm/G to create a Gm7 that is less spicy than if the bass G were mixed into the treble octaves. 9 and 11 chords are also done this way.
C7/D is a C9 chord, and C/D is a bit more "open" of a sound but still a 9 chord.
G7sus4/B is a G11 chord, dropping the 9th.
seertaak
Anyway a 2-5-1 is the rotation of a diatonic substitution of a 1-4-5 (2 for 4). Only one note difference between those two chord changes.
Ylpertnodi
>blues is mostly defined by a 1-4-5 progression and the ol 2-5-1 is pretty ubiquitous across time and genre.
I IV V, and ii V I, to be clear.
seertaak
Agree completely. I assume OP means major or minor 7th chord - they can't possibly mean dominant 7th, because...does there even exist a single blues song which doesn't have that chord?
And let's say you take maj7 chords - "you and me song", "you are so beautiful", "sing sang sung", "1975" - just off the top of my head. Pretty much any pop song which is melancholic sounding.
For min7, choose virtually any Santana song.
Even if you said maj9 or min9 it still wouldn't be remotely true. Otoh 13th chords....I think you'd have to reach to find a non-jazz occurrence of that chord. And it happens in jazz all the time.
kortex
I am pretty sure the analysis is: however the chord is notated in Ultimate Guitar, that's how it's analyzed. So if the chord sheet says C Am F G, that's exactly how it's being analyzed, even if that G is almost certainly acting as a dominant 7th, especially once you factor in what all the other voices are doing.
randomNumber7
Why is there currently so much low quality low IQ content on hn that gets up voted?
CuriouslyC
I think most musicians know that I-IV-V-I is the zero thought default for in key chord progression, it's so overused you don't need fancy analysis to figure it out.
For me, I'm more interested in the intervals and voicing pairs, because those tell you something deeper about the music that you don't get from the chord progression.
toolslive
I-IV-V-I, II-V-I and maybe I-VII-VI-V and you can consider yourself "advanced" ;)
epiccoleman
I have an almost irrational love for I-IV-VII-V. It's got a sort of happy, laid-back nostalgic vibe - sort of the best way I know to smuggle an extra major chord into a key. It can be approached in some fun different ways - can be thought of a "mixolydian" progression off the tonic, but it's also two I-IVs stuck together - almost a little mini-modulation if you wanna think of that way.
Sunrain[1] by Lotus is probably my favorite example (listen for the chords that come in under the main riff). But it's a staple in tons of rock music, and once you get it into your ears you'll hear it all over.
fuzzfactor
There's bandleaders who have geared their entire performance so if you can pick this kind of thing up by ear, follow their timing, and put effort into making them sound better, you're more valuable than some alternatives having truly advanced formal musical training.
Especially with equal or better chops, lots of players like this can go into a studio and make recordable music, in one take, without actually rehearsing together in advance.
And play in any key, since it's just Roman numerals.
apercu
To further this, my trio is down a half step because we’re older now and it’s easier to sing at a lower register. This is pretty common for a lot of over 40 artists as well.
Also, as you know, blues has dominant 7ths all over.
peanut-walrus
Wouldn't using relative chords simply show that 99% of songs use the I chord? :)
navane
It's like analyzing music by looking at the amplitude of the sound wave instead of the frequency. Music is all about the changes.
clonedhuman
Yeah. It's all about what changes, what doesn't, and when and where those changes occur. Stability and novelty.
null
sysrestartusr
> and the average songwriter isn't making data-driven decisions on how to settle on the chord structure for their song
aren't decisions like that implicit to the source of learning/inspiration? it's not data-driven on the surface of the writers awareness, and maybe not data-driven in the statistical sense, but "intuitively", "that which sounds good successively", is based on what one heard so far within the context of the song ... so it's one hundred percent data-driven, just not data that one has consciously quantified.
IMO: average songwriters and musicians and producers are the top exactly because they hit exactly that big fat belly of the bell curve/ G distribution ... I'd say you have it backwards... there's much more experimentation and less data-stuff going on left and right of the average
memset
The way this analysis, and the original dataset were created, makes no sense. This is, in part, not the author's fault, since the original data [1, 2] is flawed.
First, the original data was constructed like this: "...The next step was to format the raw HTML files into the full chord progression of each song, collapsing repeating identical chords into a single chord (’A G G A’ became ’A G A’)..."
Already this makes no sense - the fact that a chord is repeated isn't some sort of typo (though maybe it is on UltimateGuitar). For example, a blues might have a progression C7 F7 C7 C7 - the fact that C7 is repeated is part of the blues form. See song 225 from the dataset, which is a blues:
A7 D7 A7 D7 A7 E7 D7 A7
Should really be:
A7 D7 A7 A7 D7 D7 A7 A7 E7 D7 A7 A7
With these omissions, it's a lot harder to understand the underlying harmony of these songs.
The second problem is that we don't really analyze songs so much by the chords themselves, but the relationships between chords. A next step would be to convert each song from chords to roman numerals so we can understand common patterns of how songs are constructed. Maybe a weekend project.
[1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.22046 [2] https://huggingface.co/datasets/ailsntua/Chordonomicon/blob/...
zenogantner
The problem with collapsed repeated chords comes not only from the data processing -- most Ultimate Guitar songs are written down entirely ignoring how often a chord is repeated -- the classic "lyrics plus chords" format is incomplete and requires the player to somewhat know the structure of the song anyway. The write-up usually just gives hints where, relative to the lyrics, the chord changes.
moefh
Exactly. In my experience, it's not just Ultimate Guitar, all of these sites with chord progressions assume you already know how the music sounds. They're not enough for someone to lean a song having never heard it, so they're almost certainly not enough to automate analysis of the chord progressions.
b800h
I agree with you to some extent, but I'm also alive to the problem of how you achieve what you're talking about when chords can change at any point in a bar.
volemo
Could you explain the Roman numerals part?
Twirrim
By convention in music, we use Roman numerals to signify what chord we should play relative to the root (key). "I" refers to the root/tonic/key and we count up from there. [1]
So, for example, a common three chord progression in a major scale would be I – IV – V. If we take the key of C, those would be C, F, G, as F and G are the fourth and fifth chords respectively.
In the key of G, it'd be G, C and D. In that key, a good example song is "Sweet Home Alabama", where almost the entire song is just V - IV - I over and over again.
One of the most popular chord progressions, used in an astounding number of pop songs is known as the "Four Chord Trick", I – V – VI – IV, famously demonstrated by the Aussie comedy band Axis of Awesome[2]
I think I'd agree with the person you're replying to, both in that the original source is flawed due to not including the "dupes", despite them being important, and also because key is largely irrelevant, chord progression is much more important.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numeral_analysis [2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOlDewpCfZQ.
cpelletier
Minor chords are written in lowercase so the Axis of Awesome progression should be I-V-vi-IV
james_marks
This is about the simplest description of chord progressions you're going to find.
There is something peculiar that people who understand music theory tend to have a difficult time explaining it without stacking concepts and new terms.
While I'm sure those concepts are necessary for completeness, to a beginner in becomes a brick wall, and this is blessedly direct compared to, to e.g., the linked wikipedia entry.
zzo38computer
The number "I" means the chord from the first note of the scale (e.g. C E G in C major, or F A C in F major), and uppercase means major and lowercase means minor. Other numbers will then be e.g. "V" will be G B D in C major. You may then add digits as well in which case they indicate intervals above the bass, e.g. "V6" is a first inversion chord (e.g. B D G in C major) and "V7" adds the seventh (e.g. G B D F in C major).
slater-
You're talking about figured bass, which is its own type of notation.
"V6" to a jazz player would not indicate first inversion, it would be a major triad (built from the 5th of the tonic scale) with the addition of its own 6th scale degree. "V7" would include the dominant 7th (as opposed to the major 7th), "V13" would have the dominant 7th and also the 6th. Inversions aren't specified, the voicings are left up to the player.
zenogantner
Typically, chord progressions are described independently of the key they are in.
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%2750s_progression
heavymetalpoizn
[dead]
ben7799
As others have said this is interesting but use of Ultimate Guitar is flawed as the tabs/scores are so bad on that site, very often not even being close to the real chords.
On top of being simplified tons and tons of songs get rewritten with a Capo so people can just play G-C-D shapes, if your analysis doesn't look for "Capo" and then transpose all the chords then you end up overrepresenting the key of G and it's chords. Then very often 7th chords, Sus chords, etc.. all get transcribed down to major chords & minor chords due to the beginner focus. Interestingly he doesn't include 6th chords as their own thing.
To be fair there are tons of songs that do actually use those chords, so they may still end up coming out as the most popular.
I have a grandfathered in lifetime membership to UG that I only had to pay once for. It was cheap so worth it, but I really find the site kind of icky as they are mostly monetizing crowd sourced low quality work and it's very often wrong. And they nerfed their iPad app recently which is really annoying.
YZF
It's really not that bad. It's a mix. There are also many versions for most songs and often comments with corrections.
Learning songs by ear is probably a useful skill that people don't develop because of all the other sources of information... but probably helps more people play which is good.
strunz
The fact that the data showed only 6% of Metal songs having power chords should've told him to throw the data out the window. UG has terrible tabs/charts.
dyauspitr
They have quite a few versions usually but the most accurate version is usually the one with far and away the most positive reviews/upvotes.
kjkjadksj
The power tabs and guitar pro tabs are a big step up over the text based stuff on ug. You can play it in midi and see they are usually perfect.
ben7799
Obviously I've had access to those for a long time. I would still say they are nowhere near as good as published material. And sometimes I've seen the community text ones actually be more correct.
Really a question of how much you pay for it. Sounds like some plans are $25/month, that's enough to just buy tons of published material instead. I paid $5 for a lifetime membership.. very worth it.
pc86
It sounds perfect which is part of it, but if you've ever looked at the Pro tabs, especially the vocal transcriptions, the fretboard positions are all over the place, seem to be wrong about half the time, and in the worst cases I've seen nearly physically impossible to play.
Also for unknown reasons (licensing?) it's impossible to have the vocal track play when you're using a backing track.
vthommeret
If you're interested in more relative chord progression analysis, check out Hooktheory (I'm not affiliated but I think love their two books / apps):
https://www.hooktheory.com/theorytab/index
It's "just" 32K songs, but you can see the top chord progressions:
https://www.hooktheory.com/theorytab/common-chord-progressio...
And see which songs follow any chord progression you choose (either absolute or relative chords):
murki
here's a person who analyzed this data and presented it in a far more interesting way https://www.amitkohli.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/interac...
ronyeh
I’m a huge fan of Hooktheory, and have bought all their books and products. Thumbs up!
cjohnson318
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.
domenici2000
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.
johnfn
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.
TheOtherHobbes
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.
edoceo
G is the best one though, maybe D.
alexjplant
Interesting analysis. Some observations:
- Ultimate Guitar isn't exactly known for the sterling quality of its transcriptions. Teenage me submitted at least a few tabs that were clearly incorrect that still got 4 and 5 star ratings. Amateur guitarists are also infamously bad at figuring out voicings and extensions so something like a 9 might end up as a maj7 or just a triad. Adult me checks Songsterr first then uses his ear to figure out what's _really_ going on when I run across incorrect parts in the tablature.
- Some genres of music like downtuned metal are largely monophonic and instead rely on quick melodic movement or drone-y background guitars to imply harmony. This data set doesn't seem to account for this.
- There's no way that power chords only account for single-digit percentages of chords in rock, metal, and punk. There are albums that have been certified Platinum that are 90% power chords (technically power intervals, I suppose).
hirvi74
I find the analysis interesting in terms of a hobby project, but I'd be careful extrapolating too much out of this. 680k is quite the sample size, but my issue lies within the myopic selection of one instrument and the issues that arise from the platform of Ultimate Guitar.
1. I am curious, how many of the 680k songs are unique? It is rather uncommon for massively successful songs to only have one version of tabs out in the wild, so I am curious how many songs individual songs were counted multiple times.
2. This analysis only looks at guitar tabs or instrumentations there were transcribed for guitar. Chords can be made with more than just one instrument, thus that missing 7th note could actually be played by another instrument not included in the tabs.
3. As music progressed from the pre-jazz era to modern times, it became more common for people to play an instrument, like piano or guitar, while singing at the same time. Obviously there are exceptions to everything, but often times guitar pieces are simplified if the guitarist is also singing for practical reasons.
4. Music has also become more accessible as time progressed. It would be hard for an average person to learn the organ or hurdy-gurdy without access to one. It's much easier to acquire and learn piano when it can be a 4 inch thick plastic keyboard on a stand.
5. People tend to have a warped concept of the history of music. Pachelbel's Canon in D is by no means a complex song and has stood the test of time. Music through out time has also served different purposes. Hell, go back to Ancient Greece, Gregorian chants, and Medieval music. Those various time periods were not generally fully of complexity either. I would argue such times were generally less complex than modern music.
iambateman
I think Ultimate Guitar has a lot to do with this.
Sure, G is probably the most popular chord, but there are a _lot_ of chord sheets that are wrong or incomplete. If someone were to play many of these songs as charted on UG it would sound unrecognizable.
Kind of invalidates the analysis IMHO
unnamed76ri
And how many charts call for a capo to be used so the performer is using key of G chord shapes but actually playing a different key entirely?
dehrmann
> Pachelbel's Canon in D is by no means a complex song and has stood the test of time
It was actually mostly forgotten until the 1960's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pachelbel%27s_Canon#Rediscover...
Can anyone find a version without Paillard's changes? Knowing the history, I suspect they have more to do with the song's popularity than the original composition.
hirvi74
> It was actually mostly forgotten until the 1960's.
Correct, much like Bach until Mendelssohn. My point was that, well both, are still around. Plenty more music was lost to the sands of time.
Which one is it? Beethoven's 5th? I think it's his 5th that has been played at least once a month since it was first performed. Now, that is a wild record.
toolslive
Oasis anyone?
alexjplant
> People tend to have a warped concept of the history of music. Pachelbel's Canon in D is by no means a complex song and has stood the test of time. Music through out time has also served different purposes. Hell, go back to Ancient Greece, Gregorian chants, and Medieval music. Those various time periods were not generally fully of complexity either. I would argue such times were generally less complex than modern music.
True facts. The fifties and sixties were replete with simple, disposable pop music. "Yummy Yummy Yummy" topped the charts in the late 60s and has, what, three chords in it? What about "Sugar, Sugar" or the Monkees? Staff songwriters and session cats cranked this stuff out by the ton back in the day but people still love to take potshots at modern pop music for being inferior to the oldies in this regard.
a4isms
The key observation for me is Sturgeon's Revelation: "90% of everything is crud."
My most impressionable years for music were the 70s and 80s. I remember fantastic music from that time... But the fact is, most of what we hear today from that era has been curated for us. We hear the 10% of the 70s and 80s hits that weren't crud. Or maybe even the 1% that was great. If we actually listen to the top twenty-five singles from any month in those two decades, 90% of them would be crud.
I think most people comparing the present to the past are comparing everything today to the 10% of yesterday that wasn't crud.
bee_rider
We do an awful lot nowadays, though. Hmm, actually, I guess it is a straightforward equation I just don’t have my pencil or envelope handy.
Imagine that we are interacting with all the accumulated good stuff, plus the modern good stuff, as well as the old good stuff (the old crud is forgotten). If our productivity is growing exponentially, is the proportion of crud increasing over time?
pfisherman
Complexity is not just variation in chord progression, key, or melody.
Dark Side of the Moon is basically the same chord progression repeated over and over; but with different rhythm, tempo, arrangement for each song. The variation within the scope of the repetition and call backs to various melodic and rhythmic motifs at various points throughout is part of what makes the album such an epic and thematically cohesive listening experience.
otabdeveloper4
> Music has also become more accessible as time progressed.
Hell no. Before recorded music literally everyone was a musician in one way or another. Music was an activity you did while bored. (Today music is not an activity, it's a product to consume.)
They had simple woodwinds and percussive instruments. People weren't playing the church organ while waiting for the cows to come home.
Slow_Hand
Literally everyone? Have you got a source for that claim?
I don’t disagree that music performance was a pastime for many people before recorded music, but let’s be real here.
otabdeveloper4
There was no recorded or productionized music back then. And yet people liked music as much as we do now. So the only way to enjoy music was to do it yourself.
Singing and playing an instrument was just a basic life skill that everyone had back then. (Say, like driving a car or using a computer is today. Not everyone is a professional driver or computer programmer, but not being able to use a computer at all today would mean you failed at life.)
divbzero
Isn’t OP analyzing frequencies of individual chords, not chord progressions?
Analyzing individual chords involves counting the frequency of each chord (such as G, C, or D).
Analyzing chord progressions would involve counting the frequency of chord pairs (such as D—A or C—G), chord triplets (such as D—A—Bm or C—G—Am), or longer sequences of chords. For an alternative look at the data, you could also normalize chord progressions across key signatures for your analysis (D—A or C—G would both normalize as I—V, D—A—Bm or C—G—Am would both normalize as I—V—vi).
mkl
Yes, I was disappointed.
The original paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.22046 did look at chord progressions. They also trained a machine learning model to predict the next chord. Some of the chord progression data is in graph form at https://github.com/spyroskantarelis/chordonomicon.
The raw chord data is at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ailsntua/Chordonomicon/tree/.... It consists of one row per song containing a list of chord names in song order (no timing information) and Spotify ids for track and artist. It seems like Spotify has a different id for every released version, so it's really hard to search for particular songs in the data.
To normalise across key signatures you need to know what key the song is in (at each point), and the data doesn't contain that. For many genres it could be guessed reasonably accurately from the chords.
naijaboiler
i know. I was so disappointed reading that article. I had gone in expecting an analysis of progressions. e.g. VI-IV-I-V instead I got a page of chords analysis.
chord progression != chords.
thaumasiotes
> Isn’t OP analyzing frequencies of individual chords, not chord progressions?
Not according to the other comments, which say that the data set strips chords that follow identical chords, as if "too" was one of the most common words in written English.
narrator
Then there's the most complex pop song of all time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnRxTW8GxT8
LandStander
The song is "Never Gonna Let You Go" by Sergio Mendes
userbinator
The first few words of your comment, along with the sibling comment mentioning a "Rick", made me hesitant to click that link.
nwatson
Thanks for the Rick Beato video. Yes, complex.
null
anigbrowl
One thing that jumped out at me was the data point suggesting there are very few power chords in electronic music. But in fact, they're ubiquitous because it's easy to make a power chord in a single note, by tuning oscillators a 5th apart. Any synth with 2 or more oscillators comes with a bunch of 5th patches (or patch sheets if it's all analog). It's one of the first synthesis techniques people learn to make thick-soundings patches.
Also the whole idea of doing the analysis based on absolute rather than relative notes makes little sense to me as a musician, though perhaps that's because I didn't start with guitar or a tuned instrument like a trumpet.
teleforce
Fun facts you can use circle of fifths as references or cheat sheet for good Chord Progression [1]:
"Chord progressions also often move between chords whose roots are related by perfect fifth, making the circle of fifths useful in illustrating the "harmonic distance" between chords."
It'll be very interesting to analyse the available songs data to find chords that follow circle of fifths.
By cross-reference patterns with the circle of fifths, we might just end up with the LLM equivalent of data-driven musical composer that's capable of generating harmonically pleasing, genre-aware, even hit songs chord progressions.
[1] Circle of fifths:
jancsika
> An “interval” is a combination of two notes.
Minor nitpick: it's a "dyad" that is a combination of two notes.
An "interval" is the difference between two (or more) pitches. And just as you'd measure the space between your eyebrows using a ruler, you'd measure the interval between middle C and concert A using your ears.
The bonus, however, is that our listening apparatus is already quantized to octaves-- if you hear a pitch against a second pitch that's double/quadruple/etc. the frequency of the first, your ear marks this interval as special. It's likely most of you've already used this fact to your advantage; perhaps unwittingly, when someone begins singing "Happy Birthday" outside your normal singing range. (Though most renditions of "Happy Birthday" lend credence to Morpheus' lesson from The Matrix that there's a difference between knowing the path and walking it.) :)
TheOtherHobbes
It's not unusual to see dyads described as intervals. Technically they're different. But where "triad" is used all the time, "dyad" just isn't used much.
Intervals are basically the number of semitones between two pitches. Life would be easy if you could just say "seven semitones", but in the context of scales and keys the intervals have names - second, third, etc - with modifiers that are somewhat context dependent.
Example: an augmented fourth and a diminished fifth are both six semitones wide, but you'd use one name or the other depending on the key/scale and other details.
Intervals that span more than an octave are usually called [number of octaves] + [usual name].
dehrmann
> dyad
Correct, though you'll much more commonly hear about triads, as in major and minor triads, and you'll hear "power chord" more often than "dyad," even though it's one specific dyad.
> if you hear a pitch against a second pitch that's double/quadruple/etc. the frequency of the first, your ear marks this interval as special.
Some of that is that the higher octaves reinforce existing overtones, so the higher note is already there in a sense.
jerf
"(Though most renditions of "Happy Birthday" lend credence to Morpheus' lesson from The Matrix that there's a difference between knowing the path and walking it.)"
I have to resist the temptation to deliberately sing my renditions of Happy Birthday on the diminished fourth/augmented fifth of whoever the loudest person is, as a passive protest of the fact that even if I do, it hardly affects the result.
It has somehow become a very impressionistic song, when sung by The People. There's definitely the sense of the relevant intervals as the song progresses but the sheer randomness of the intervals of each singer relative to each other has, I think, attained some sort of actual cultural status that is actually special to that song. Get a few people to sing "Row Row Row Your Boat" and they are generally much more on tune for some reason, barring those who can't carry a tune at all under any circumstances. It's like some sort of cultural signaling about how they don't take birthdays too seriously or something like that.
gchamonlive
That's new for me. What's an interval between three pitches called?
droidist2
Could call them "stacked intervals" like "stacking thirds" to make a triad
crdrost
So when you've got an interval you usually mean two sounds that are separated in time. So like the iconic Jaws Melody dun-dan-dun-dan-dun-dan, those notes are separated by an interval that could be called one semitone, 100 cents, or a minor second, depending on who is talking.
Or in “Oh when the Saints Go Marching In,” the ‘Oh-when’ interval is two tones (four semitones), 400¢, or a major third, the ‘when-the’ interval is another minor second, and the ‘the-Saints’ interval is one tone or a major second. Adding those up we find out that “oh-Saints,” if you just omit the other words, is 700¢ or a “perfect fifth”, so “saints-Go” is a descending perfect fifth, -700¢.
Now you can play all four notes at the same time and you would still refer to these distances between the notes as intervals, but nobody is likely to describe this sound as a bunch of intervals. It is a “I(add 4) chord” in that context and the +100¢ interval between the major third and the perfect fourth is what gives it its spiciness.
So then you have to clarify whether you mean that we are playing one note first and then two notes together second, or are we playing all three notes at the same time, or are we playing all three notes separately.
If it's one and then two, or two then one, the higher note of the dyad will sound like the melody usually, and you'll reckon the interval between those two. People who have really well trained musical ears, instead hear the shift on the lowest note, but it requires training.
If you mean that all three are separated by time, then it's a melody. In this case these first four notes of “Oh When the Saints Go Marching In” would perhaps be described maybe as an arpeggiated major chord with a passing tone, same as I said earlier as “I(add 4).” I'm not actually 100% sure if that's the right use of the term passing tone or whether passing tones have to lie outside your scale or something.
If the three notes are played at the same time, that's a chord, specifically it's a triad chord. You might talk about the stacked intervals in that chord, a major chord stacks a minor third on a major third, a minor chord stacks a major third on a minor third, stacking major on major is augmented, stacking minor on minor is diminished, and there are suspended chords where you don't play either third, so sus2 stacks a fourth atop a second and sus4 stacks a second atop a fourth. So a lot of those have their own names, and some of those names get weird (like to stack a fourth on a fourth you might say “Csus4/G,” which treats the lowest note G as if it were the highest note but someone decided to drop it down an octave).
thaumasiotes
> So like the iconic Jaws Melody dun-dan-dun-dan-dun-dan, those notes are separated by an interval that could be called one semitone, 100 cents, or a minor second, depending on who is talking.
For what it's worth, I would call that a "half step".
dehrmann
That's like asking what's the distance between A, B, and C.
seba_dos1
Two intervals?
gchamonlive
A third, fourth, fifth, sixth... Triton... Those are intervals. I ask again, what's an interval between three pitches? Is it a triad? If it's so, than it's not a minor nitpick, OP is just being plain pedantic for the sake of it.
thaumasiotes
> Minor nitpick: it's a "dyad" that is a combination of two notes.
> An "interval" is the difference between two (or more) pitches. And just as you'd measure the space between your eyebrows using a ruler, you'd measure the interval between middle C and concert A using your ears.
How are you imagining that works? If you had three eyebrows, how much space would there be between them? Intervals are, by definition, the space between two points.
Using absolute chord analysis instead of relative chords (i.e. roman numeral analysis) doesn't make sense. As others have noted, the original dataset is flawed because the structure of a song is critical, you cannot omit repeating chords. Programmers/analysts should take more care to understand music theory or the underlying field at hand, before compiling datasets or doing analysis.
"Most common chord" is mildly interesting, but not really that useful. The most common key, and the most commonly used chords relative to that key (i.e. with roman numeral analysis) would be much more useful and interesting. This would help paint a clearer distinction between e.g. country and jazz, not that "jazz uses Bb major more". Also, anyone with general instrument knowledge would surmise that since Bb and Eb instruments are much more prevalent.
"If you’re sitting down to write a song, throw a 7th chord in. The ghost of a jazz great will smile on you."
7ths don't belong to jazz only, and the average songwriter isn't making data-driven decisions on how to settle on the chord structure for their song.