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by taylorbuley 5115 days ago
I'd love to build this data into a neural network and see if I can come up with robosongs. It should be quite good at coming up with "What chord should come next?"
2 comments

So if you open up a book like 'Music Theory for Complete Idiots' there's a section on "Chord progressions" that essentially has what you'd recognize as a state transition table for "what chords will sound good after this chord?" and I'm pretty sure there's a row that looks like [iii => IV, vi].

Coming up with a computerized vocabulary for the elements of coherent large-scale composition structures would be more of an interesting area to research than individual chord transitions, because the latter is really a solved problem.

A friend of mine has a site that does something similar. It uses music theory to generate real-sounding music for musicians to practice sight-reading. https://sightreadingfactory.com/
That has been done indeed, that state transition diagram: see http://mugglinworks.com/chordmaps/genmap.htm for a generic chord progression map.
I'd love to hear a Markov chain. I don't think it'd be pleasant. But it'd be fun.
Quite a few of these online:

MC trained on classical composers: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOZ2Q-Ls48U

Iannis Xenakis was a major 20th century composer who incorporated MCs into some works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DTzOWKaDrVI

Haven't seen a serious effort with pop/rock though. Lyrics might be the sticking point.