Guitar Chord Diagram Suggestion for Western Popular Music

TL;DR

This paper introduces a context-aware tool for suggesting guitar chord diagrams in Western popular music, improving suggestion quality by considering previous chords and analyzing dataset patterns.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel context-based model for guitar chord diagram suggestion that outperforms previous methods by incorporating prior chord information.

Findings

Adding context improves F1-score by up to 27%.

The model reduces over-reliance on standard open chords.

Analysis shows some chords are played in over 20 different ways.

Abstract

Chord diagrams are used by guitar players to show where and how to play a chord on the fretboard. They are useful to beginners learning chords or for sharing the hand positions required to play a song.However, the diagrams presented on guitar learning toolsare usually selected from an existing databaseand rarely represent the actual positions used by performers.In this paper, we propose a tool which suggests a chord diagram for achord label,taking into account the diagram of the previous chord.Based on statistical analysis of the DadaGP and mySongBook datasets, we show that some chord diagrams are over-represented in western popular musicand that some chords can be played in more than 20 different ways.We argue that taking context into account can improve the variety and the quality of chord diagram suggestion, and compare this approach with a model taking only the current chord label into account.We show that adding previous context improves the F1-score on this task by up to 27% and reduces the propensity of the model to suggest standard open chords.We also define the notion of texture in the context of chord diagrams andshow through a variety of metrics that our model improves textureconsistencywith the previous diagram.