There was a typo in the post that has been corrected. It now reads “If you write a song in C with an E minor in it, you should probably think very hard if you want to put a chord that is anything other than A minor or F major after the E minor. For the songs in the database, 93% of the time one of these two chords came next!”
co-founder of Hooktheory here. When this article was published (2012), it was based on the first 1300 songs in the library [https://www.hooktheory.com/theorytab]. At that time, the two most common chords after E minor for songs in the key of C major were F major (59% of the time) and A minor (34% of the time). The library now has about 12k songs and the percentages have changed. Still the same two chords, but now F major (IV) is only about 34% of the time, and A minor (vi) is about 24% of the time. Here is an updated plot of the most common chords after E minor for songs in the key of C major https://imgur.com/a/lBfVK0X?
Here are a couple pop songs from the last 10 years originally written in major that I think sound pretty neat in the minor mode. (Once on the song page, need to click the "Key" button to put into a new mode)
If you are more into the songwriting / application side of music theory, definitely check out "Hooktheory I" http://www.hooktheory.com/music-theory-for-songwriting, which is the music theory / songwriting book written by the creators of the API used in the OP.
It is amazing to see how far HTML and JS have come. What are using for the audio engine when in "synthetic" sound mode? Do you render a custom performance on the fly from pitch samples, or play from a pre-computed mp3/wav?
I've used http://www.songsterr.com before, which is almost identical to this, except it uses Flash. One thing you might consider, to compete with them, is a larger library. I'm pretty sure they built their massive (practically complete) library from pre-existing GuitarPro tabs. From your docs, it looks like you can read GuitarPro tabs, so it might be worth doing a massive import. Not sure about the legality of this, but it is worth considering. I'm pretty sure songsterr basically went from non existing, to having almost every song ever created when they launched. The only way they could do this is using GuitarPro tabs. I wonder if they have a licensing deal with the copyright owners? Anyway, I'm definitely interested in how you do sound in Javascript. Cheers for a fantastic UI and a beautiful design.
Thanks! All analyses on Hooktheory are in done in sections. Analyses load one section at a time. Since songs (well, most songs) repeat the same harmony in each verse / chorus / ... it made sense for use to use the section approach. One the Trends page the section that loads is the one that matched the chord progression you searched (if multiple sections of the same song match, we omit them from the song list). If other sections of a song have been analyzed, there are buttons just below the title so you can see them.
Regarding "chords following em": Since all of the songs were transposed to the key of C, em == iii, am == vi, and F == IV. Really what the post says is IV and vi follow iii most often in popular songs.
Hi horsehead, I don't know if you made it to the Music Editor part of the site http://www.hooktheory.com/editor but you can use the Music Editor to write songs using I V IV (type 1,5,4 on your keyboard) and such. One of the main goals of Hooktheory is to make more people aware of these basic elements of music theory and help people incorporate it into their musical endeavors.
Hi fferen, I V iv V is indeed a super popular progression. You can see an example of it here: http://www.hooktheory.com/analysis/view/james-blunt/youre-be.... One cool thing about the way we store music (using relative notation) is that we can compare any two songs to see how similar they are harmonically. For example, there are several "similar songs" shown below the I V vi IV example in the link that all use the same progression in different keys.
Yeah, I'm on the Hooktheory team that wrote the article. I love your idea! We're 100% set up to do that kind of thing. It would certainly make an interesting, fun, social set of posts. Today was our first exposure to the world and the feedback / ideas have been amazing. Thanks for the idea. - Chris
Hi planetguy, that is an excellent suggestion, and something we've actually already started working on. One of the things about the database our community is building is that it can be used for so many interesting studies. BTW, the Rihanna song you mentioned came on the other day and I heard someone sing "we found Dove in a soapless place". Couldn't help but laugh.
That is a fair critique of the article. The vast majority of the songs that came into the analysis were in fact billboard top 100 so that naturally filters out songs with chords that might sound bad (chords that as a rule are not built off of the major scale the song uses). What we found most interesting, however, was that there are certain patterns that really do show up. The one that was most striking, and that we pointed out in the article, is that the iii chord is almost always followed by IV or vi in pop music. There were similar trends for other some of the other chords that we'll be posting in a later article.