- Author
- Chris Dalla Riva
- Published
- 17 April 2025
- Kind
- Paid newsletter post, free preview only
- Original
- www.cantgetmuchhigher.com/p/i-analyzed-chord-progressions-in
- Subject
- Music theory and data
What it is
Chris Dalla Riva writes the newsletter Can't Get Much Higher, about music and data. This issue explores a dataset with no prior hypothesis.
What it says
- The name Chordonomicon was coined by 5 researchers last October. It covers chords and genres of nearly 680,000 songs.
- Dalla Riva had no hypothesis and wanted only to see what the dataset held.
- The dataset has nearly 52 million notated chords.
- G major and C major top the chord counts. Together they make up 24% of all chords.
- Chord choices differ across genres, which the post calls interesting.
What evidence it gives
The preview shows a chart of the 20 most common chords. They come from nearly 52 million chords. Analysis of progressions, which the title promises, is not in the preview.
Interests and limits
Only the free preview was read, and the rest of the post is paid. The author also sells a book on hit-song data and mentions it. The post's main findings on progressions were not seen. Only the free preview was read; the paywalled remainder was not available.