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Summary
In Data Driven Exploration of Musical Chord Sequences, Basu, Nichols, and Morris present a new way of classifying different genres of music based on inherent chord progression styles, and an interface for both music novices and experts alike to modify styles of chord progressions to form their own unique genre of music, or blend two artists or styles together.
The polygon slider component of the interface consists of a polygon in which each point represents a style of music or artist (and all of them are user-defined). The current point in the polygon (inside the polygon) can be defined by the user as well, and can be slid around inside the widget in real-time. Using a distance algorithm, the system finds the current distance of the current point from each point of the polygon (each style), and assigns a percentage to each quality being compared. The system will then take properties of the chord progressions from each of the styles (based on the percentage given) and create a new chord progression style that the user has defined. In this way, users can create their own style of music (as chord progressions are inherent to the differences in musical styles) and put the progression behind a melody to create music. The possible choices for inputs include styles such as Country, Rock, Classical, or Pop, and artists such as AC/DC, the Beatles, and Lenny Kravitz. Chord progression styles for each genre of music are obtained by averaging chord values (and sound frequencies) from a large database of songs in that genre. Progressions for artists are averaged in a similar way from a database of songs by that artist.
Discussion
Being a musician, I thought it was really cool that genres of music could be exactly specified by types of chord progressions. I mean, everyone knows that some types of music have chord styles that are always seen, for example the Blues scale and chords in Jazz and Blues, and minor chords in Alternative Rock. But to think that a specific chord progression such as C->F->G constitutes a Country song is pretty interesting. Now I can tell all my family and friends that I hate Country music because I was born to hate their exact chord progressions! Not my fault, I was just born that way. And the interface to be able to create your own chords (even as a novice) is great. Many people wish they knew how to play instruments, and seeing how it is an extremely hard process, this interface would give many people a way to be creative without taking the time and effort to learn an instrument (or compose music by writing scores of notes).
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