Musical mystery solved after 40 years! It took an obsessive mathematician to discover what the heck the Beatles were playing for the opening chord of “Hard Day’s Night”:
ScientificBlogging:
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.”
Fifth Beatle: George Martin. On the piano F key. Can you hear it now?
Miss Scarlet in the library with the candlestick?
I just finished reading the Wikipedia explanation of the opening to Hard Day’s Night. I haven’t been that confused since high school calculus. I recognized the character set but not the language.
In unrelated yet musical news, I read a recent interview with Pete Seeger. He is getting old, his voice is failing and his memory isn’t what it used to be. I’m going to miss that guy, probably more than Dylan.
Who are our folk singers of today?
—Matt
Well, there’s Bruce Springsteen and Billy Bragg in the old sense, but I have a feeling a lot of the vital social observation and critique is going on in the kind of hip-hop that doesn’t make the top 40.