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The Chordify algorithm is the soul of our company. Our AI calculates the chords of a song when you hit the “Chordify” button. But is it always right? Most of the time, yes. Sometimes, however, there are little distractions in the music that make the calculations a bit tricky, resulting in other chords than you’d expect. In this blog post we’ll explain how artificial intelligence (AI) learns, and how you can help to improve it.
Chordify algorithm
The Chordify algorithm is an AI that listens to any song you feed it and figures out the song’s chords all by itself. This is why we have a limitless database of songs, because you can literally Chordify any audio file and therefore any obscure niche song in the world. Well, it’s a bit more complex than that of course, but we don’t want to get into nerdy technicalities. The important thing to keep in mind is that our AI is listening to the song you ask it to Chordify.
Sometimes, there are no chords played, but just a bassline, a vocal part, a solo on an instrument, or just another sound. Even then the Chordify algorithm analyses what it “hears” and tries to calculate possible chords to fit that sound. This could result in some odd chords that actually don’t fit at all.
Training the Chordify algorithm
The fun part about machine learning and deep neural networks of which our AI consists, is that they can improve. We do have to train it though, and we have different ways of doing so. For instance, we send the Chordify algorithm to summer boot camp where it listens to thousands of humanly annotated songs, and learns how to analyse similar sounds when it encounters them in the “wild”.
Another way our AI learns is… From you. That’s right, you can teach the Chordify algorithm by showing it where the AI miscalculated a chord. As a matter of fact, we encourage you to do so, because the more our algorithm learns, the better it becomes, and the more you as a user will encounter the perfect chord progression. Sounds good, right?
Problem with the chords?
“How can I help out?”, you ask. It’s easy, actually. Everytime you — as a Premium user — check out a song and see that there’s a chord that doesn’t match what you think it should, you can just hit the “Problem with the chords?” button. By doing so, you’ll see two options. The first one is the “Report inaccurate chords” option. Click on it to open a window where you can let us know which chords are inaccurate according to you.
The second one is the “Show all edits” option. Select that one to check out all the edits that have been made. By “edits” we mean changes made in the chord progression of a song by clicking on the “Improve” button.
When you select “Show all edits”, you’ll see all the changes made by Chordify users, or our very own star editors like Tom Strandberg. All our editors are accomplished musicians with a perfect pitch. They are the main teachers of our Chordify algorithm and thanks to them, all the songs in our channels contain the right chord progressions. By having them in our team we have the best of both worlds: an almost perfect AI, and the human touch to complementaire it.
In conclusion
So everytime you encounter a chord progression that can be even more accurate, just let us know. We’ll put the best of the best on the job so that you can play your favorite tracks, and our Chordify algorithm can learn how to be even better than it already is. It’s a pretty solid win win situation if you ask us. What do you think? Enjoy and happy jamming!
