Chord Progressions in Popular Songs

The curve thickness encodes the relative frequency of transitions in chord progressions. Mouseover to see details on particular chord transitions.

Type in the search boxes to filter results. Examples: Chord Progression “145”, Artist “gaga”, Title “Love”. Searches are conjunctive.

Click on the song links to view individual progressions (provided by Hooktheory)

Search by Artist

Search by Title

Search by Chord Progression

Data generously provided by Hooktheory.

Music usually consists of melody (typically, the words being sung) and chords (the guitar and/or keyboards accompanying the melody). As a song plays, the sequence of chords played is called its “chord progression”.

This visualization shows the chord progressions for several popular songs on a chord diagram. For instance, If a song has a chord progression that goes from the tonic (1 chord) to the dominant (5 chord), then there is an arc between 1 and 5 in the above diagram. Curves represent edges going in both directions, and thicker curves mean more chord transitions start at the thick point. Therefore, curves that are very thick at one end but thin at the other imply an asymmetry between those two chords. For example, for this dataset, 6 to 4 is more frequent than 4 to 6. Edges are colored to show the more frequent origin.