Discussion around chord progressions being 'off-topic'

Question

I have a question about my Music: Practice & Theory Stack Exchange post: What's the key and verse chord progression in this song?

I believe that the rule forbidding users from asking for help with chord progressions should be removed.

It currently is deemed 'off-topic' because it's 'basic analysis'.

To me, it seems arbitrary and, as we know, chord progressions are a fundamental part of popular music.

Where else can I, or any user, go online to get this kind of assistance? Yes, there maybe discussion forums out there, but Music Stack Exchange is the exact place and I should be able go to ask this kind of question and get a helpful answer.

I believe my question is well-defined and was 'substantial'.

It was suggested, essentially, that I 'beef up' the question a bit. But why should I need to? I dislike superfluous information and it's irrelevant to the respondent what my attempts had yielded: I want to know the correct answer, not advertise my ignorance or poor ear.

Also, is the fact that working out a chord progression by ear is deemed 'basic analysis' on this site not subjective and/or indicative of a bias towards more talented musicians? That would surely be against the total ethos of Music Stack Exchange in its attempt to help us all learn.

Answer 1

From our tour:

Music Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for musicians, students, and enthusiasts. It's built and run by you as part of the Stack Exchange network of Q&A sites. With your help, we're working together to build a library of detailed answers to every question about music practice, performance, composition, technique, theory, or history.

We accept questions of all levels, but questions on the site are designed to answer questions other will have and that have a defined answer. While knowing what key a song is in is important, having a valid question of "What key is X song in" for every single song creates a lot of noise and doesn't address the underling issue of learning how to identify the key of a song.

There's many, many songs out there and there will be many, many new songs. You want know this song's key and someone else will want to know the key of a different song. The question will only be useful for this specific song since the answer you are looking for only pertains to that song and as a site we would like to build a general knowledge of music rather than a specific especially when the questions on this specific topic (what key is a song in) is near infinite. It's the teach a man to fish argument.

A more useful question would be asking how to find the key of a song by listening to it which has already been asked. This is more useful because it can be applied to any song that someone has a question about rather than a specific song.

This question itself was not easy to find because we have so many other questions on the site that this one was buried. The requirements for analysis have also not been met as just having the link there, someone would need to transcribe it. Here are all the related discussions on these topics on the meta:

• If some analysis of specific works is to be allowed, what are the criteria?
• Criteria for allowed analysis of specific music
• What is the rationale for not allowing a transcription request?
• confusion about the difference between 'technical analysis' and 'transcription'
• Should we reconsider music identification questions if the OP is able to provide a transcription of the melody
• Wording of the close reason for "bad" analysis questions

Answer 2

Firstly, my current rough understanding of what 'analysis' questions are allowed is - we don't allow anything where having 'the score' of the piece would answer the question. To be fair, I think the users of this site are fairly consistent in applying that idea - and hence the question you mention falls foul of that, because if you had 'the score', you'd be able to see what the key was, and the notes in each chord.

I put 'the score' in quotes there because, for many pieces of music, there isn't a good-quality score representation available. When I talked about this in SE chat before, IIRC we discovered that there wasn't a score readily available for about half of a random selection of popular works - so the logic of not allowing 'transcriptions' can't reasonably be based on the idea that a person could just get the score - as often that's not actually possible.

One reason that's sometimes given for not allowing transcription-type questions is that they wouldn't be useful to future readers. I don't think this argument necessarily holds up; wanting to know how to play an existing song is a common need amongst musicians; I imagine there are a lot more musicians who will want to know the chords to Kylie Minogue's Golden than want answers to some of the other questions asked on this site. At best, you might say that the usefulness will come down to the popularity of the song, but even then, people might be interested to come across new songs they haven't heard before.

Another argument for allowing transcriptions is that stack exchange users are encouraged to

Focus on questions about an actual problem you have faced. Include details about what you have tried and exactly what you are trying to do.

And "I am trying to figure this out and I can't" is very much along those lines. Sometimes on Music.SE we seem a bit leery of helping people with their real-world, individual problems; we seem to want to pay more attention to the very general purpose, 'library of answers' type question. And there is value in that, but there's also value in the specific. Sites like interpersonal skills and language sites are full of very personal questions that for whatever reason, many other users find value in. Sci-fi is full of story-identification questions that you might think would be useless to others, but they're often very well-received and appear in Hot Network Questions.

One area where I particularly agree with you is:

To me, it seems arbitrary and, as we know, chord progressions are a fundamental part of popular music.

Absolutely. "I have this audio and I want to work out what notes to play" is just as much of a real and present problem for people doing music as "I have this score and I want to do a roman numeral analysis".

There's also the argument that the 'teach a man to fish' approach is more useful. In many cases, I agree - working out a key, for example, often isn't too tough, and we do already have some decent answers giving some good ideas how to do that. However, the "teach a man to fish" idea only has value if you actually do it, and I haven't actually seen any really good general answers on this site on how to work out chords. There are a few good bits of advice here and there but not much that I couldn't tell you, and I'm far from brilliant at working out chord progressions quickly.

There's also the argument that we're not trying to replicate existing archives on the internet (or elsewhere) of musical transcriptions. Again, this is true - but that doesn't necessarily prevent us from stepping in where there is a problem with what's already available. I'd see that as analogous to a problem that SE language sites have - they want people to be able to ask about words, but not take the place of dictionaries. And I'm pretty sure they have ways to solve that.

One possible argument for not providing transcriptions or parts thereof might be if there would be likely to be any legal issues. But the issues there would be the same as with reproducing transcriptions in questions for the purposes of more 'substantial' analysis, and that's not something I've heard any concern about.

That's probably enough rambling - Just some thoughts, and I'm not expecting to change many people's minds, so I won't go into any thoughts on how we could service these questions without devaluing the other content on the site. I'd like to think we could do it, if we put our heads together though!