Online study on chord recognition with Beatles songs

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WongoTheSane
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Location: Paris, France

19 Oct 2017

Some guys from a Finnish university have set up an online experiment to study how the brain processes chord progressions. They have you try and identify four well-know Beatles songs from chords played on the piano, without any rhythmic context.

First they play two chords, and you can then hazard a guess. Then they play 3 chords, and you can guess again, then 4, then 8 and finally 16 chords. In between songs, they ask questions about your musical background and knowledge. Then you're asked to recognize those songs in their original recording, and then they test your knowledge on the Beatles (how many songs you can name, play, etc).

It's not as easy as it sounds, I only got two songs right. There are twists in the experiment which I won't reveal (they ask not to spoil it for others so their results remain meaningful), and after the test, they provide some preliminary data on the results obtained so far.

It takes about 20 minutes to go through, and as a Beatles fan, I enjoyed it. If interested, go to:

http://ivansamples.com/beatles_chords/

They advertise several months of data gathering, so don't expect the final results anytime soon! But it's fun to participate.

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Carly(Poohbear)
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Joined: 25 Jan 2015
Location: UK

19 Oct 2017

I'll have a look at that tomorrow when I have more time, sounds interesting...

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Carly(Poohbear)
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Posts: 2871
Joined: 25 Jan 2015
Location: UK

20 Oct 2017

I picked up on one very quickly, did not get the rest until they played at the end then I believe I got them all.

Thought it was a sneaky way of getting information out of you. hats of to them.

found it hard to answer some of the questions as I don't know music theory, I play chords, can't tell you what I'm really playing, would not say I learnt any songs really by ear as I play my own stuff.

WongoTheSane
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Posts: 1851
Joined: 14 Sep 2015
Location: Paris, France

20 Oct 2017

Yeah, I agree some questions are tough. How many times have you listened to song X? Well, it's probably above a thousand for some songs, but really hard to pinpoint exactly when you've been listening to them for a lifetime. Same for "how many times have you played song Y": I don't know, I bought "The Complete Beatles" in the early eighties and I occasionally pull out the book and play a dozen songs, not very well, sometimes I don't do that for a year and other times I do it every day for a month, so it's hard to evaluate.

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