Mathematician cracks Beatles mystery - perhaps

http://www.theage.com.au/entertainment/mathematician-cracks-beatles-mystery--perhaps-20120909-25lx1.html

by bootload • 14 years ago

54 39 14 years ago

theage.com.au

gdg92989• 14 years ago

um.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvxPc5MPEuQ

DigitalSea• 14 years ago

Presto. Compared the chord that Randy Bachman played against the original track and it sounds exactly the same to me. For anyone else interested in knowing what the 12-string chord is, pretty sure this is what he described:

1st string = G on the 3rd fret (pinky) 2nd string = C on the 1st fret (pointer finger) 3rd string = A on the 2nd fret (middle finger) 4th string = F on the 3rd fret (ring finger) 5th string = C on the 3rd fret (with the thumb, curl it over) 6th string = G on the 3rd fret (with the thumb as well)

mintplant• 14 years ago

The original sounds a bit lower to me.

Link for comparison: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSm0M-BbVdY

ender7• 14 years ago

Yeah, and the dissonances are not quite right either. Close...but not quite.

mbell• 14 years ago

Pretty hard to tell if its a real difference or just the recording quality. Most of the Beatles recording I've heard sound pretty washed out.

icarus_drowning• 14 years ago

I agree with Jason Brown, who, the article states, noted that the piano chord in the background is critical to capturing the overall sound. Listening to this, I hear everything but the touch of dissonance added by the piano, which completely changes the feel of the chord.

Listen to this and the original[1], you can clearly hear a missing piano part, which gives the chord such a crunchy bite. The damper pedal is clearly depressed as well, and it sounds like there is some sympathetic resonance from the guitars/bass that's helping to muddy up the piano sound.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSm0M-BbVdY

kens• 14 years ago

This seemed familiar; Hacker News discussed this topic in 2008: "Beatles Unknown 'A Hard Day's Night' Chord Mystery Solved Using Fourier Transform", http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=347231

The current article claims improvements on that solution.

mistercow• 14 years ago

>Dr Kevin Houston, from the University of Leeds, used sophisticated software to split up the sound on the record into its component frequencies.

I love when reporters say silly things like implying that something like the Fourier transform is state of the art.

marbletiles• 14 years ago

The reporter doesn't -- the article goes on to talk about Fourier transforms, and how they'd been used in previous attempts.

The sophistication alluded to in the article is in the visualisation of the results: the reason previous attempts had got it wrong was because looking at the flat numbers returned had misled them.

bootload• 14 years ago

A more detailed explanation by Kevin Houston on this topic for the British Science Festival, "The Beatles' Magical Mystery Chord" (8m49s) ~ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKx0DG-5Qyg&feature=playe...

grueful• 14 years ago

This is quite good, and it briefly hits a couple of the more obvious ways in which naively applying an FFT will lie to you (superposition, harmonics).

If you really want to kill it, you could always come in with a learning model which accounts for the characteristics of the instruments and the way in which the sound evolves over time. An FFT is effectively looking for the integrated power in a frequency band. This is often more than enough to do the job, but it misses potentially useful information found in the time domain.

CrankyPants7• 14 years ago

Now, if they can figure out how a boy band that started out with a following of veritable teenyboppers wound up receiving near-universal adoration, I'll be really impressed.

Edit: This is a sincere request: can someone tell me why I should care about this? If the homeless guy on the corner–sorry, make that two homeless guys, with one on the piano to get that extra bit of dissonance–had been first to play this as people walked by, I can't imagine it would have amounted in much interest, appreciation, acclaim. (Or, donations, for that matter.) Had they done the same with, say, the Moonlight Sonata, something tells me passersby just might take note.

If this is just academics in the field acting like academics sometimes do in their respective fields, then, I get that. But as someone who has always found the ratio of fawning-to-substance fairly high when it comes to the Beatles, this kind of thing doesn't help.

Maybe I'm totally missing the point, and this has as much to do with the Beatles as recreating the THX sound does with Star Wars.

keithpeter2• 14 years ago

"Now, if they can figure out how a boy band that started out with a following of veritable teenyboppers wound up receiving near-universal adoration, I'll be really impressed."

They were a bit rougher round the edges than your modern boy band, having been playing in 'adult clubs' in Hamburg. Remember the Cavern Club was in Matthew St, not a salubrious district then.

To answer the question: right time, right place, bloody clever manager

weef• 14 years ago

> right time, right place, bloody clever manager

So true but I'd like to add: amazingly innovative producer (George Martin) and brilliant engineer (Geoff Emerick).

Without those two guys the Beatles recordings might have been just ordinary.

Interestingly, the fiddling by Capitol Records might have contributed to their success early on (when they weren't destroying the intended album track sequence) - for example I prefer the US mono version of I Want To Hold Your Hand over the English version.

Tycho5• 14 years ago

Are you asking why The Beatles are so highly acclaimed, or why people obsess over somewhat mundane minutiae in their work?

To the former, The Beatles are a unique case because they had two major songwriting talents in the same band. This is a freak occurrence that you don't really find anywhere else (although arguably with HDH and with The Stones, but they had spectacular results too). The synergy between them pushed Lennon and McCartney to even greater heights than a master songwriter would typically reach on his/her own, and also attracted and inspired talent from others: George Martin and George Harrison, and to a lesser extent Ringo. That's the how, although their body of work speaks for itself.

People obsess over the minutiae because so many people have heard their records, compared to other records which might be equally or more cleverly/mysteriously produced.

colomon• 14 years ago

You should add Queen to that list, too. Makes your "uniqueness" statement a little weaker, but I think it strengthens your overall point: having more than one great songwriter in a band is a really potent combination.

mynameishere• 14 years ago

Fleetwood Mac had three, all pretty equal in quality. The Doors had two, not quite so equal though.

mgkimsal4• 14 years ago

Not JUST two major songwriting talents, but performers. Really, in the early days, when they were doing more covers, George had a pretty equal share of the spotlight. One could easily be a fan of any one of the band, and you'd be able to hear one of 3 of them sing during a concert (less so in later years). Doesn't matter how much of a Bill Wyman or Charlie Watts fan you were, you'd never hear them sing ("in another land" notwithstanding!)

The songwriting combo was killer, but even before that, I think they were fairly unique in sharing 'front man' duties throughout a set. Very few bands do that even today, mostly because they can't really pull it off - the Beatles could.

Having more than one main singer/frontman is something I think often gets overlooked in the Beatles' story appeal.

CrankyPants7• 14 years ago

Good question. I realized I was a bit vague about that, though I suppose both have crossed my mind. The former would seem to beget the latter, though.

In terms of the two major songwriting talents in the same band argument, that's pretty interesting, and, as the thread you inspired amply demonstrates, is a pretty interesting way of looking at a number of bands, and even seems to have examples in non-musical endeavors.

I wonder how much of that's due to just having two people who can generate more good ideas than one, how much is an undefinable chemistry between the two, and how much might actually because there's a good amount of self-regulation that occurs that way: if I were a songwriting genius, I'd possibly (probably?) be pretty unresponsive to taking criticism, but if I respected the crap out of the songwriting talents of the person making the critique, then that'd be a totally different dynamic.

vl• 14 years ago

>Now, if they can figure out how a boy band that started out with a following of veritable teenyboppers wound up receiving near-universal adoration, I'll be really impressed.

Ah, they did figure it out a long time ago - Beatles were writing a good music.

batista• 14 years ago

>Now, if they can figure out how a boy band that started out with a following of veritable teenyboppers wound up receiving near-universal adoration, I'll be really impressed.

Or you could, you know, buy one of the tens of books in the history of the Beatles, the sixties music scene, and their contribution to it. Or ask any musician you consider serious (a jazz guy perhaps?) for the importance of their music.

>This is a sincere request: can someone tell me why I should care about this?

It's a social bookmarking site. The other users cared enough about this to have it upvoted. You do not "have to" care about it. That's not how social bookmarking works.

>If the homeless guy on the corner–sorry, make that two homeless guys, with one on the piano to get that extra bit of dissonance–had been first to play this as people walked by, I can't imagine it would have amounted in much interest, appreciation, acclaim.

If those homeless guys managed afterwards to write several fabulous records and have a big cultural influence on a whole era, then people would be interested in that initial sound too.

In the way people are interested in anecdotes from the early UNIX days of which they could not care less if they happened to some random programmer in the 90s.

CrankyPants7• 14 years ago

Books: Time seems unrelenting enough that I'm not interested in reading tens of books about bands whose music I don't already love. Thanks for the suggestion, though.

I'm related to a serious (professional and quite successful at it) musician, with an incredibly solid background in jazz, and he can't explain why he's so head-over-heels for the Beatles. He's tried, to no end, but it usually goes along the lines of, "they were just so...perfect. Every sound, every little thing, they just had something that nobody else has." Plus all the standard stuff of, "they're incredibly influential!", which thing I don't deny, though I don't find it sufficiently satisfying a response, either. I don't mean to trivialize influence, but influence isn't, by definition, inherently good. For all I know, we'd have better music now if it weren't for them. (The argument for that is easier than it might be for some other influential songwriters, but getting into that isn't my intent.)

Social bookmarking: I asked why I "should," not why I "have to." Important distinction. Mine was an invitation for smart people (which tend to be in longer supply on this site than on many others) who tend to have reasoned tastes to try to explain to me why they're fans. Saying the records are "fabulous" is fine, but: why? Say it's wholly a matter of taste, and I'm OK with that, but then I don't understand why so many Beatles fan act like I'm the antichrist for not being madly in love with their music. It happens pretty often that, in this pop culture, someone expects me to love some Beatles song/Cirque show/something as much as they do, and upon the discovery that I don't, they usually presume that I'm some kind of insane. Which seems odd, if it's all just a matter of taste. But if it isn't, I'd like reasoned answers (and this thread is not without some good contributions).

epo• 14 years ago

How simpletons try to sound profound. Take something that other people like and ask "I don't get it, why is this so special? Convince me." Do your own homework.

CrankyPants7• 14 years ago

I wasn't trying to sound profound. Had I been, I probably would have said I was "more popular than Jesus."

But, thanks for the feedback, anyway. I've been trying to simplify my life, so being called a simpleton means I must be doing something right.

philwelch• 14 years ago

For what it's worth, their production at the time was innovative even if their music was not so much. Their promotion was also innovative, and the band was careful to continuously popularize the innovations of better musicians, earning an undeserved reputation as innovators themselves.

CrankyPants7• 14 years ago

So, I've never cared for most of their songwriting. A few exceptions, but, for the most part, not so much.

I heard a song of theirs once in the late 90s, and thought, "holy crap, this sounds like it was made 30 years later," in the same chronologically impossible way that some Can "sounds like" some Radiohead.

I haven't even thought about that since then, but your comment reminded me of that, and I think you're onto something. Whether they were ahead of their time production-wise, or just highly influential, could probably be argued to death, but there's no denying that Beck wouldn't sound like Beck were it not for the Beatles.

elteto• 14 years ago

> This is a sincere request: can someone tell me why I should care about this?

You don't have to, no one said that this link is only for CrankyPants to enjoy, or for that matter that HN has to cater to specific interests. It is simple not to care, just close the tab and go on to the next post.

The fact is that many people think the Beatles are pretty cool and love their music, and I'm pretty sure that the kind of demographic that visits HN indeed loves the Beatles. Now you mix their music with the Fourier transform and you got a hacker worthy post, even if the article is a little fluffy. Also even if I am not the greatest fan in the world, the fact that for 50+ years no one has been able to figure out the exact chord arrangement in the song is enough to spark my curiosity. So you know, I don't enjoy every Ask HN post either, but I just move along, there is plenty of content.

CrankyPants7• 14 years ago

The reason I said it was a sincere request is because I honestly wanted people to try to convey why they find the Beatles so compelling. It wasn't a commentary on the degree to which I enjoyed that post, however much I may have carelessly let it look like one. I hope that's clear.

Just the idea that for over half a century a bunch of serious musicians have been trying to exactly duplicate this chord and have been unable to do so perfectly is interesting, yeah. If someone just laid out that premise I'd think it unlikely that it'd be so difficult to duplicate. I get that. Thanks for helping me see that aspect of it a bit more clearly.

What I don't get is why people have been trying for over a half a century to duplicate a chord arrangement. If they said it was for the challenge of it, sort of THX-style, then I get that. But if it's largely because it was played by the Beatles, then that seems a bit strange to me.

Again, thanks.

lignuist• 14 years ago

I recently heard in a documentary, that John Lennon detuned his Guitar a bit all the time.

ArekDymalski• 14 years ago

We are The Scientists. Struggling to fight critical problems since 1964.

Mathematician cracks Beatles mystery - perhaps

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