Continuation Patterns
Choose a chord phrase and compare which continuations are most common in the full collection or within a genre.
continuations
by genre
3-5 chords
Compare Continuations
Chord maps for musicians
Harmonic Trends
Think of this as an experienced musician reading a large songbook and pointing out the harmonic fingerprints of a genre, a decade, or both. The dashboards turn thousands of chord sequences into a browsable analysis of harmonic vocabulary.
What would a seasoned musician notice?
Chord progressions are musical vocabulary. Some phrases are everyday grammar, some point strongly toward a genre, and some become more visible in one decade than another. These tools make those patterns searchable instead of leaving them as vague listening impressions.
- 1
Hear the genre signal. Compare which chord phrases feel like shared pop grammar and which ones cluster around jazz, country, rock, rap, or another style.
- 2
Hear the decade signal. Look for phrase shapes that become unusually present in one era of the collection.
- 3
Separate familiar from characteristic. Notice which loops are everywhere and which ones carry more stylistic identity.
From chords to vocabulary
Song chords
G D Emin C
down
Same shape, one starting point
C G Amin F
down
Musician questions
Is this ordinary vocabulary, genre color, decade color, or a little of each?
1. Choose a phrase length
Compare short gestures like C G Amin with longer loops like C G Amin F.
2. Choose the musical context
Use the whole song collection, narrow to a genre, or inspect decade-colored phrases.
3. Read it as evidence
The charts show chord labels, counts, context, and which styles overuse a phrase.
How to read the pictures
Bars mean observed continuation share
Longer bars mean that continuation happened more often in the selected corpus slice.
Dots mean chord phrases
Nearby dots are phrases that behave similarly in the song collection.
Chord phrases work like vocabulary items
Like word vocabulary in a corpus study, each short chord phrase can be counted and compared across contexts.
Style Lens Explorer
Compare which chord phrases show up unusually often in a genre or decade. Use it to spot style fingerprints.
genres
decades
3-8 chords
Compare Styles
Chord Shape Browser
Browse the chord-shape map from short three-chord gestures to longer eight-chord loops. Search for chords you already use.
3-8 chords
map view
search
Browse Chord Shapes
About The Project
The charts are built from the Chordonomicon dataset, which collected chord charts from Ultimate Guitar. That source makes the collection especially useful for popular, guitar-based harmony, but it also means the patterns reflect the biases of web-scraped guitar tabs and chord sheets.
What the model sees
These dashboards use chord sequences from that corpus and count short
chord phrases across songs, genres, and decades. The goal is harmonic
analysis, not audio transcription or a complete history of all music.
Why everything starts on C
We compare harmonic shape, so equivalent transpositions are grouped
together. For example,
C F G and F Bb C
are treated as the same I-IV-V chord shape in different keys.