Database of pop chord changes?

February 7, 2012 4:26 AM

Source for machine-readable lists of chord progressions of popular songs?

I'm interested in doing some harmonic analysis of popular music - in particular using Markov chains and the like to generate chord sequences.

To do this I need a substantial corpus of chord progressions of popular songs - this kind of thing. I'm not in a position to input this stuff manually so I'm gonna need stuff that's predigested.

I'm sure someone else has already tried this -- anyone got any clues?

posted by unSane to media & arts (6 answers total)

I don't know how many are out there, but have you looked at PowerTab or Guitar Pro tabs? They're listed among "regular" (non-machine readable) tabs on many guitar tab sites.
posted by electric_counterpoint at 5:11 AM on February 7, 2012

Don't know how readable they are, but there is a pile of stuff here, that you can sort by song title or artist
posted by timsteil at 5:50 AM on February 7, 2012

Yeah, those are not really what I'm talking about.I have guitar pro and a ton of tab. I'm talking about something that's been predigested, ie someone's already taken the changes and put them into a form where they can be easily analysed.
posted by unSane at 7:57 AM on February 7, 2012

Start from the MusicXML format, and start from there? Some JS code around this.
posted by gregglind at 8:52 AM on February 7, 2012

Did you ever get anywhere with this? I really want a searchable chord progression database. Why has nobody done this already?

Joe
posted by pianojoe at 1:25 AM on July 17, 2012

No, I never found a resource that I liked. I think the only way to do it would be to crowd-source it somehow or maybe scrape results from resources like Ultimate-Guitar.com.
posted by unSane at 6:42 AM on July 17, 2012