2011 Popular Music Paper

The goal of our first paper was to gather statistics about patterns in rock harmony, such as the frequency of different chords and chord progressions. The results are reported in our article, "A Corpus Analysis of Rock Harmony" (Popular Music 30 [2011], 47-70) [PDF]. As mentioned in our project overview, this paper reports on only a 99-song subset (the RS 5x20) of the corpus since one song was considered to contain no discernable triadic harmony.

Below, you should find the original collection of analyses that we used in this paper. Many of our results discussed in the paper should be reproducible using this original dataset in concert with the programs we have posted.


Original Encodings