There are many myths and mysteries surrounding the Beatles’ monolithic career – did the band invent feedback? What’s the strange opening chord from A Hard Day’s Night? Who actually wrote In My Life?
A mathematical study has used probability to solve the mystery of whether John Lennon or Paul McCartney wrote In My Life.
Many of these have been studied, investigated and subsequently solved. No, they didn’t ‘invent feedback’, but they were one of the first bands to capture and put it to vinyl (you can hear this groundbreaking recording at the start of I Feel Fine). In the 2000s a Beatles fanatic/maths professor named Jason Brown cracked the code of the opening chord from A Hard Day’s Night using Fourier Analysis, a method based on work done in the 1820s by French scientist Joseph Fourier which reduces sounds into their “constituent sine or cosine waves” to decipher exactly what notes are being played. As for who actually wrote In My Life, that’s has been solved now too, by the very same person in fact.
In My Life, the nostalgic ballad from 1965’s Rubber Soul, is credited to Lennon-McCartney, like most of the Beatles’ early songs. While it’s undisputed that Lennon wrote the lyrics, both later claimed to have written the melody.
In a 1984 Playboy interview, McCartney recalled “going off for half an hour and sitting with a Mellotron… writing the tune”. However, Lennon is remembered saying that Paul’s “contribution melodically was the harmony and the middle-eight itself” and nothing more.
For the past decade, Brown has worked with statistics to solve the dispute. Presenting his finding a few weeks ago in a presentation titled “Assessing Authorship of Beatles Songs from Musical Content: Bayesian Classification Modeling from Bags-Of-Words Representations”, he found that, based on probability, it was Lennon that wrote the melody.
In an interview with NPR (below), Stanford mathematician Keith Devlin described how the study worked, including the phrase “bags-of-words representations,” which he says “actually goes back to the 1950s.”
The “bags-of-words” technique takes text and, ignoring grammar and word order, produces a collection of common words – a method used to generate the very first spam filters. For this study though, rather than use words, the mathematicians analysed snippets of sound to find trends and similarities.
In an analysis of “about 70 songs from Lennon and McCartney… they found there were 149 very distinct transitions between notes and chords” that are unique to each of the songwriters. “When you do the math,” Devlin says, it turns out “the probability that McCartney wrote it was .o18—that’s essentially zero.”
“In other words, this is pretty well definitive. Lennon wrote the music. And in situations like this, you’d better believe the math because it’s much more reliable than people’s recollections, especially given they collaborated writing it in the ’60s with an incredibly altered mental state due to all the stuff they were ingesting.”
“I would go with mathematics.”
[via Open Culture / NPR]
