Splicetoday

Music
Oct 29, 2008, 06:55AM

Beatles Mystery Solved

As with pretty much all Beatles tunes, "A Hard Day's Night" is unforgettable. In particular, the opening chord is especially striking. But musicians the world over haven't been able to figure out, exactly, what chord it is. Until now.

It took a mathematician:

Four years ago, inspired by reading news coverage about the song’s 40th anniversary, Jason Brown of Dalhousie’s Department of Mathematics decided to try and see if he could apply a mathematical calculation known as Fourier transform to solve the Beatles’ riddle.  The process allowed him to decompose the sound into its original frequencies using computer software and parse out which notes were on the record.

It worked, to a point: the frequencies he found didn’t match the known instrumentation on the song. “George played a 12-string Rickenbacker, Lennon had his six string, Paul had his bass…none of them quite fit what I found,” he explains. “Then the solution hit me: it wasn’t just those instruments. There was a piano in there as well, and that accounted for the problematic frequencies.”

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