

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

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mistercow
>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.

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bonaldi
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.

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kens
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.

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gdg92989
um.. <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvxPc5MPEuQ>

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mintplant
The original sounds a bit lower to me.

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

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ender7
Yeah, and the dissonances are not quite right either. Close...but not quite.

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bootload
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...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xKx0DG-5Qyg&feature=player_embedded)

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grueful
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.

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CrankyPants
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.

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Tycho
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.

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CrankyPants
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.

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Tycho
Well great songwriters (especially rock stars) probably have egos that get in
the way of collaboration with their equals, i.e. being in a band together. The
fluke of the Beatles was that they both started collaborating as school boys,
and both turned out to be top tier songwriters. This also let them develop a
healthy working relationship (when The Beatles split up I don't think their
talent diminished, at least not for another 5 or 6 years, but there was much
weaker quality control and not as much variety in there albums). With respect
to the other bands mentioned, I don't think they can claim to have multiple
top-tier songwriters. Maybe in the 3-5 classic songs range but not in the
10-30+ range.

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

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

