Hooktheory was recently interviewed by the nice folks over at Easy Ear Training. It’s a great interview that talks about our backgrounds, the philosophy of the site, and how we got started.

…Hooktheory really began as course in the Music Department at UC Berkeley that we taught as part of the DeCal program there. As we were teaching the course, we were actually creating and laying the groundwork for a lot of the tools on our website now. It was all very primitive back then, but the response was so positive from the students that we decided to keep going after it was over. It’s all sort of snowballed from there.

Read the full interview by clicking here

I recently stumbled across John August‘s podcast, ScriptNotes, and thought this was worth sharing. For those of you who don’t know who John is, he’s the screenwriter behind Charlie’s Angels, Go, Corpse Bride, Charlie and the Chocolate factory (the one with Johnny Depp, not Gene Wilder) and bunch of stuff you’ve almost certainly heard of.

It turns out he’s a Hooktheory fan.

…And he wrote a really nice review that made me smile. Thanks John! (if you’re into screenwriting and movies check out his podcast).

Click Here To See An Excerpt From John’s Review →

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. 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. Of course, if you play an instrument or want to write songs, being aware of these things is obviously of great practical importance.

Last year, we discussed the first results of a long term effort to study the patterns found in the chords of popular songs. The reception that we got was incredibly positive, and we received a ton of great feedback.

The two most common questions we’ve gotten from people have been:

1. “I really like the sound of chords X Y Z together. What other songs use this same progression?“
2. “After I’ve written a few chords that sound good together, I need help knowing what a good next chord might be. Can you show me what the next chord is likely to be given a starting set of chords?“

Our answer: Hooktheory Trends

Our crowdsourced database is uniquely suited to answer these questions because it contains the harmonic data of songs indexed in a way that makes it easy to perform this type of analysis. We’ve been hard at work designing a free tool that will make exploring the answers to these questions both fun and easy. Continue reading below for a short tour or get started using Trends by clicking here.

How Trends Works

1. When you open Trends, you will see the most commonly used chords in the key of C. (You can switch to a different key or Roman Numeral notation if you so desire. Also, if want to see less frequently used chords, you can click on “more…” to see the rest.)

   

   The most common chords in the key of C.

2. To begin, click a chord you are interested in. In this example, we will choose C major (the I). After you choose a chord, you will see the next most likely chords to come after it based on the data analyzed from the actual songs in our database. Below, we learn that G major (the V) is the most common chord to follow C (the I), occurring 31% of the time. The probabilities were computed by performing a Markov Analysis using every song in the database.
   

   

   When you click a chord, you see the next most likely chords, and their likelihoods, written as a percentage.

3. By clicking on more chords you can build up a chord progression that you are interested in. Any time you click a chord, a list of all songs that use the chord/progression gets updated to the right. In this example, we see songs that use C → G (the I to V).

   

   Click more chords to build a progression. Songs using the progression are listed to the right.

4. At any time, you can click a song from the list to see exactly how it uses the chords – they are even highlighted for you. You can then choose to listen to the YouTube music video synchronized to the section of the song using these chords or hear a simplified instrumental version.

   

   Click a song to highlight where it uses the chords. Play that portion of the song’s YouTube video or hear a piano play the raw chords.

   Here, after noting that “Someone Like You” by Adele uses the same chords as “Cryin’” by Aerosmith, we have clicked on Adele’s song see where she uses these chords.

The ability to quickly explore visually how chords are used in different songs opens up a huge potential for discovery and learning. Below, we have come up with a few suggestions for where you might start. Let us know in the comments if you think of other interesting uses.

Get started using Trends by clicking here!

Fun things to try

• Start on a C major chord (a I chord) and follow the most probable chord sequence to find the most common chord progression used by popular songs. Hint: it’s the famous 4 chord song progression.
• Look up the chords to a song you know and see what other songs use that exact sequence of chords.
• Play a couple chords on your instrument that you like and ask the database for the chord that is most likely to follow this sequence based on the songs in the database. If you’re writing a song, you can use this information to pick a chord that other songs have used (so it is known to sound good). Alternatively, you can use this information to try something that other songs don’t do to find a unique sound.
• Look for ridiculous combinations of songs that use the same chords. (My favorite so far: Skrillex’s Scary Monsters and Nice Sprites and Taylor Swift’s Mine both use G am G F)
• Become a contributor! if you want to help make the database better, contribute an analysis or fix an error using our Music Editor (it’s also great learning tool for writing your own chord progressions).
• Tell us things you come up with that you found the most interesting. We’ll discuss your most intriguing finds in future posts.

Happy New Year everybody. Today we pushed several new features to the Music Editor that we hope you like: time signatures, modes, and looping.

We’re really happy with the amount of use that the editor (and the site in general) is getting for being so new. Recently the 10,000th song was created in the editor, and the site is now getting over 100k hits per month and growing.

Time signatures

“Common time” (4 beats per measure) is great, but it’s obviously not sufficient. Today we’re adding support for 3 and 6 beats for measure. You’ll find this option in the upper right of the editor when you load a new project.

Modes

The Major mode is really useful but it’s definitely not the only mode that is used in music. Now the editor lets you write and analyze songs that aren’t written in the Major mode. This means you can write and analyze songs in the Minor, Dorian, Mixolydian modes, etc.

In addition to being able to choose the mode for songs you write and analyze, you can also “borrow” chords from any mode. We hope to post an article about modes shortly since I know they can be a source of great confusion for new musicians.

Looping

This was quietly updated a while back. You can now loop playback so you can hear an analysis (or your original composition) multiple times.

Most requested songs for the song wiki

Our Wiki of user contributed harmonic analyses of popular music is really starting to take off. If you’re looking for a song to contribute, we now have a way to compute which songs the database is most in need of:

Most Requested Songs

At the moment, the database seems to want Eminem and Kanye West songs. The list is updated dynamically as songs are added.

Smaller changes:

• The vii˚ chord is now supported in the GUI.
• The tempo of a song can now be changed with higher specificity.
• Improved the interface for synchronizing YouTubes to analyses.
• Various bug fixes.

Let us know if you have other comments/questions/feature requests. We want to make the Music Editor as useful to the community as possible.

If you haven’t already, try out The Music Editor now.

The internet has been abuzz recently with reports of the deterioration in quality of music. Of particular note: a recent Spanish study which purportedly proved it, scientifically no less.

We want to set the record straight about pop. In this article we’ll respond to some of the common complaints that are being made about popular music and show that, in reality, things just aren’t all that bad.

Click Here To Find Out Why →