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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I don’t disagree that music performance was a pastime for many people before recorded music, but let’s be real here.
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.)
Or listen to live music in your community
You're just making this up. Playing an instrument is a complex skill that requires a lot of work and an expensive piece of equipment. Music has been a profession since at least Mesopotamian times
In the same way, making a joke to amuse oneself makes you a comedian.
Making a simple BASIC program to amuse yourself makes you a programmer.
And so on...
Or it's something you just, you know, do? I listen to and play a lot of tunes from the Appalachians and you really do get the sense that just about everyone played something back in the day. They developed complex and extremely localized traditions that did not require formal music education to pass down. Some of them were musical geniuses, many were middling, just like with most things people do.
Even poor families would often have an heirloom fiddle around to learn to play on (sometimes even brought with them from Europe), and ownership of family possessions was much more communal. Many parlors or bars would have a banjo or parlor guitar around for whoever wanted to make some music while hanging around. Those without access or with limited woodworking skill also often made their own fretless banjos (which look different from what you might normally recognize as a banjo) out of wood and hide, or other simpler instruments like dulcimers. Not that there weren't also semi-skilled luthiers making non-concert-grade fiddles at more affordable prices. All this culture is well documented in the Foxfire manuals on Appalachian folk traditions, complete with schematics on how to make those things from different regions. Pretty far from 'made up'. Hell, a lot of American music traces its roots back to music made by actual slaves. It's hard to think of a group of people with less means and access to the things you've mentioned, and yet, music.
Music theory may have a nearly limitless ceiling for both complexity of understanding and expense of instruments, but your statement here completely ignores the entirety of global folk tradition. And it does seem like an accurate observation to me that participation in casual musicianship in everyday contexts has declined significantly in correlation with a lot of the trends in modern living.
- 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).
It's the same with lead sheets / the real book style music books. Performing musicians need to reproduce music quickly so only the triad will be written down even if the musician ends up playing some other extensions.
The data is heavily biased towards simplicity. You can make conclusions about the data - but not music as a whole.
It does inspire hope that someone will take the same dataset and provide statistics on the most common progressions.
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.) :)
> An "interval" is the difference between two (or more) pitches.
Or,
1 Note/Unison
2 Interval/Diad
>3 Chord
And, I agree an interval is essentially a distance. Distance between three points makes no sense as they might very well lay outside of one straight line. Even they are on the same line.. are we measuring the distance between each distance?
It's ambiguous what that might even mean, but the original poster might think of a collection of intervals which is 0 or more notes with intervals relative to a given root.
For example if you think in integers (pitch set notation):
m6 { 0 3 7 9 } Minor 6
5 { 0 7 } Power Chord
ma13 { 0 2 4 5 7 9 11 } Ionian
N.C { } No Chord/Rest
°7 { 0 3 6 9 11 } Diminished Seventh/Dim Seven
.. etc
Also note that 13 means two different things, either the septad above or a pentad of the form 1 3 5 7 13 aka 7(6) "dominant add six"
So in set notation it's:
ma13 { 0 4 7 9 11 }
13 { 0 4 7 9 10 }
Etc..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).
For what it's worth, I would call that a "half step".
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.
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].
> 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.
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.
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).
chord progression != chords.
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.
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.
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.
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/...
For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%2750s_progression
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.
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.
"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.
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):
https://www.hooktheory.com/theorytab
https://www.hooktheory.com/trends
It's a weird coincidence to see this post since I only occasionally remember about Hook Theory and binge it, but I remembered earlier this week.
Many of you have probably heard the Axis of Awesome four chords song (if not, look it up, it's great), but it's fun doing the same thing with other songs.
Like, did you know that you can sing the chorus of Numb by Linkin Park over the chorus of...
* I Hate Everything About You by Three Days Grace
* Immortals by Fallout Boy
* Cheap Thrills by Sia (swung Numb lol)
(+ the bridge of The Rock Show by Blink 182)
Numb has a pretty common chord progression so I could pick songs with the exact same chords, but there are also some oddly specific finds like this video game (?) song that inexplicably has the same relative chord progression as Hotel California https://www.hooktheory.com/theorytab/view/zun/reincarnation#...
---
I am often surprised how a seemingly simple chord progression has only one result, even when I search by relative chords and ignore extensions and inversions, e.g. https://www.hooktheory.com/theorytab/chord-search/results?ke...
However when you put that query into the normal search box, it does match a lot more songs, showing that there is a i III _ VII trend, just that i III vi VII is strange (which I guess makes sense). Perhaps my lack of music theory makes it harder to normalize my queries, but it's also possible that (1) there isn't enough data or (2) there is inconsistency in how people annotate the pieces (some songs will have II II II II, for example, following the rhythm, whereas some songs will have just a single II).
I remember once creating a dataset based on 50 random tunes from the Real Book and sharp keys were less than 20% of the total (based on the key signature at the start of the score) so that graph in the article doesn't seem right.
Maybe the discrepancy is because modern jazz fusion tunes are under represented in the Real Book and those are usually more guitar-oriented, so perhaps more likely that the musician would pick a sharp key like D or A. As opposed to straight-ahead jazz were people try to accommodate for sax/trumpet/trombone etc.
Or maybe it's because chords like D or A can be dominants in minor keys that are flat keys, e.g. D in the key of Gmin or A in the key of Dmin. - EDIT I just realised that dominants are listed separately so this is not the case.
One more thing: according to the article, major triads make up more than 50% of chords in jazz... what? That's certainly wrong, most major chords in jazz are usually maj7th or 6th even when they don't have upper extensions. I think that what they actually meant is "major chords that are not dominants". But they used the label "major triad" instead.
To be fair there are also high quality charts on UG, but they generally require a paid subscription (I think they are called "pro" charts). Maybe the dataset should have been limited to those but I'm not sure about the legal implications given that they are a paid product.
I would expect that a full analysis should write the roman numbers (so you will have to know what key it is as well), and might also consider such things as non-chord tones, modulation to other keys, etc. (However, this is not as simple as just putting them into the computer and writing a SQL query or whatever.)
What I had seen on television and what I had read, is that I-V-vi-IV chord progression is common in modern music. (There is also i-VI-III-VII, which is the relative minor key than I-V-vi-IV, which is obvious once you realize it.)
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I IV V, and ii V I, to be clear.
Also, as you know, blues has dominant 7ths all over.
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.
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
I encourage you to read this site's guidelines and strive to do better moving forward, as your comment kinda seems to break 5-6 rules all at once.
We could list the logical fallacies you're displaying in the spirit of "debate and reasoning" but I have no faith this would go anywhere productive.
Report me instead of complaining about guidelines if retaliation for being exposed for your ignorance is so important to you.
You assume my choice to not continue the conversation is because I have nothing to say, when in fact I do so because I have nothing to say to you specifically.
Both in the case of music and linguistics, there are people who argue (probably not wholly without merit) that looking at the mathematics too much is missing the point.
Imagine that we were at a stage in which LLMs didn't really make sentences, only output like "Potato rainbow screen sunny throat", then we studied which words are used. There's really not much value to the words at all, we could maybe see which words are bundled together, we could try to ascertain what kind of words are used more, but in wanting to study the coherence of it all, it just holds very, very little value.
Chords by themselves hold very little meaning. The sensations evoked come from chords in a context and the progression provides very valuable context. Talking about a chord in a song is like talking about a word in a book, it's never really about that piece of the puzzle appearing, it's about how that piece is used in the puzzle.
The fact that you never refer to "syntax" even in this attempt at high level reasoning gives me pause and I cannot help but to conclude that you are making arguments in bad faith.
Depends on what do you call data-driven. A songwriter most likely knows that a lot of fifth chords to gives power-metal vibes, and diminished and out-of-key songs do give these ghosts of jazz.
That led me to remember of the famous combinatory proof that was published in Redhit to answer which sequence of some television series one should watch to achieve a minimal chain of something.
But I was also concerned that finding chord progression for all songs would be the hardest part, compared to any chord progression which can be just generated by anyone.
it shows which chords exactly set black metal, power metal, metalcore, death metal and progressive metal apart
(i also try to do my own narrative on chords, but so far there's nothing to write home about: https://rawl.rocks/)
Likely some of the “simplicity” observed in the chords here aren’t actually due to the music being simple, but that the user who contributed the tab made their best simplified guess as to what it was.
Unfortunately the analysis is probably flawed because of the poor quality of data.
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.
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.
Also for unknown reasons (licensing?) it's impossible to have the vocal track play when you're using a backing track.
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.
I thought maybe there's types of metal and punk that I don't know about, but Wikipedia, LLMs and guitar tab sites all agree with me. Punk and metal is overwhelmingly power chords, so I don't see how the data comparing chord types can be correct.
I assume that the analysis is simply counting every song chords, so a unknown band you've never heard about has the same impact as The Ramones.
I'd like to see the same graph weighted by band popularity using either YouTube or Spotify data.
You could play a G power chord for 3 minutes straight and it would count as one.
For instance, G being the most common key in jazz doesn’t ring true. I’d wager that it’s Bb, Eb, F in some order.
Maybe all of the songs in this set were simplified for guitar players?
If you do these analysis using very basic notation knowledge (letters on top of lyrics are chords!), can you discover by yourself what you missed?
Many self-taught amateur musicians go through something similar. You play the simple chord chart, then you notice by yourself that it is not enough. You start to understand the instrument, training the ear, and learning beyond the simple charts.
Can you do that with data? Possibly. Maybe, as others mentioned, another dataset would be needed. However, to suggest that such dataset needs to be "a better one in notation" seems misguided.
Using notation to point out the mistakes makes no sense. Unless the message in those critics is "learn notation".
Many musicians can just play a song that feels good. Never knowing anything about notation or frequency stuff.
Maybe a data guy can extract something useful from an incomplete dataset too. What was the author trying to do? Showing some prowess with data while learning about music. I think the result was good.
edited to remove some snark.
However, it's a loose exploration of data, no hypothesis. The "flaw" only exists if you treat it like it is meant for professional musicians.
But you really need good (and preferably ethical) sources of data to do that, and UltimateGuitar ain't it. You also probably want to engage with some music theorists to normalize the data to give you better analysis and ask better questions than "what is the most common chord."
From this analysis I don't think "is music getting simpler" can be answered, and I think the trends are interesting questions to investigate for musicologists but this data set and analysis are too flawed to answer them.
I’m shocked at the similarities between country and punk. Did not imagine that!
There is no genre more power chord heavy. (pun intended)
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.
"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:
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