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I'm interested in doing some linguistics-inspired computational musicology on chord progressions and am wondering if there are any freely available databases of chord progressions.

Obviously, I could construct one manually from lead sheets, transcriptions with chords show, etc but am wondering if such things already exist.

By "database" I mean any structured data, preferably a text file or similar.

rshallit
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James Tauber
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  • I am curious. What are you actually doing with this *"linguistics-inspired computational musicology on chord progressions"*? Are you writing software of some kind? – musicwithoutpaper May 19 '11 at 15:07
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    @musicwithoutpaper yeah, for analyzing chord progressions, inferring grammars and generating chord progressions; nothing too ground-breaking. Will hopefully help me develop more of my 'Sebastian' software too. – James Tauber May 19 '11 at 15:19
  • @James: Interesting. The reason I ask is because I am a programmer and I think it is possible and within reason to write a program to add a left hand to a melody that ands up sounding good... and I wondered how far that concept has been taken or if that was what you were talking about. That would be the part about "generating chord progressions". Glad this category has not been left untouched! – musicwithoutpaper May 19 '11 at 20:26
  • @musicwithoutpaper there's a decent amount of research out there on accompaniment generation (as well as melody generation) but, like many programmers, I want to develop my own particular take on it (and I'm a linguist by training so that gives another perspective as well) – James Tauber May 20 '11 at 01:56
  • Funny, I am working towards this myself. – griotspeak May 23 '11 at 01:25
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    Markov chains ftw guys. – Rein Henrichs May 25 '11 at 16:39
  • Probabilistic phrase structure grammars will give more large-scale structure, I think, but Markov chains are an obvious low-level tool and exactly the sort of thing I'd like the data for – James Tauber May 26 '11 at 02:40
  • @musicwithoutpaper, James: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oGFogwcx-E I apologize in advance. – NReilingh Aug 08 '11 at 04:18
  • @JamesTauber, just wondering how your project was going? Is it on Github? I'm also a developer who happens to be doing the same type of project, but for French linguistic analysis ;) I would be interested to see your work! – Chris Cirefice Apr 01 '14 at 06:32
  • @ChrisCirefice I haven't made any progress towards collecting chord progressions in machine-readable form but you've prompted me to start looking again :-) – James Tauber Apr 08 '14 at 03:52
  • Glad I could be an inspiration :) it seems as though @nreilingh has an answer that will suffice. As per the comments there, URL decoding is a standard set of functions that are included in just about every language. That said, you can probably get most of the data you need from that source! – Chris Cirefice Apr 08 '14 at 11:20

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The iReal b app for iOS uses downloadable chord progressions that are kept on the developer site's forums. iReal b uses a link that starts with irealbook:// and contains the chord data in the "URL" that follows.

View the source of the page linked above and you should be able to copy the whole thing.

NReilingh
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    The irealbook format requires cleaning up, its not insurmountable but you have to de-encode the string of every song - every space is a %20 etc and a bunch of other characters in it. Its a hassle, but doable. – Basso Ridiculoso Aug 08 '11 at 01:58
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    In most programming environments, this is as simple as calling up a "URL Decode" function. This "%20" way of encoding characters for transport in URLs is actually a standard: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percent-encoding (this is more of a Stack Overflow question, really lol) – Rafael Almeida Oct 03 '11 at 00:08