Researchers from Canada and the U.S. are using math to unravel one of the greatest musical mysteries of the modern era: Who wrote “In My Life,” a nostalgic rock ballad on the Beatles’ 1965 album “Rubber Soul.”
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It’s a song both John Lennon and Paul McCartney have laid claim to, sparking an enduring debate on the authorship of the melody.
But a new statistical model developed by researchers at Dalhousie and Harvard universities that was used to analyze multiple Lennon-McCartney songs has concluded that Lennon likely penned “In My Life.”
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Jason Brown, a mathematics professor at Dalhousie, says the researchers analyzed the Beatles music using five main categories – melody notes, sequences of notes, chords, pairs of chords and melodic contour. Each category was then further broken down, resulting in 149 categories for data collection.
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He says the model, which is 80 per cent accurate, found a 98 per cent probability that Lennon wrote “In My Life.”
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