

Beatles Unknown "A Hard Day's Night" Chord Mystery Solved Using Fourier Transform - bdfh42
http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_releases/beatles_unknown_hard_days_night_chord_mystery_solved_using_fourier_transform

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nickb
Actual details.. the article doesn't even reveal what the chord is:
<http://www.mathstat.dal.ca/~brown/n-oct04-harddayjib.pdf>

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omouse
So what's the chord??

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LogicHoleFlaw
From the paper:

George Harrison on 12-string pairs 2 through 5: (A2 A3) (D3 D4) (G3 G4) (C4
C4)

George Martin on piano: D3 F3 D5 G5 E6

John Lennon on 6-string: C5

Paul McCartney on his Höfner bass: D3

Expert mixing masks the timbre of the piano amongst the guitars, leading to
the "mystery."

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j2d2
Who's Paul Hofner?

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naish
Should read: Paul McCartney on a Hofner bass (semi-acoustic, violin-shaped
electric bass guitar).

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LogicHoleFlaw
Fixed.

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michael_dorfman
Dominic Pendler dedicated a chapter of his book "The Songwriting Secrets of
the Beatles" to this chord, and demonstrates quite convincingly that there was
a piano involved. It's a bit disappointing that the Dalhousie professor
doesn't point to the existing literature before claiming to have discovered
something novel.

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mechanical_fish
Where does this article (the PDF cited by nickb, not the link, which isn't
working for me anyway) claim to be doing something novel?

It's a cute demonstration of basic physics, more-or-less at the freshman level
(although lots of high school students could follow it). It doesn't claim to
be anything else.

UPDATE: Finally got the blog link to load. While the original paper is modest
in its claims, the blog hypes them up and then fails to cite the original
paper. This blogger does not earn a cookie.

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LogicHoleFlaw
The paper is a little bit hand-wavy about the mathematics of how CDs are
sampled, how the Fourier transform works, and how frequencies are converted to
semitones. But it does have references which mostly alleviates my desire for
rigor :)

Once the author has a list of pitches though, the process of assigning pitches
to instruments is very well laid-out. The key to locating the piano was that
piano strings are hit in triplets, and each string in a triplet is tuned ever
so slightly differently.

Signal processing was one of my favorite courses in college.

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barryfandango
It's nice to have an algorithmic way to find the pitches in a chord, but
honestly anybody with a good ear can pick that out. Try sitting down with a
Bill Evans recording and figuring out the different chords you hear -
something jazz students do all the time.

The fact that it's not reproducible on a standard-tuned guitar might have
stopped guitar players from figuring it out on the fretboard though.

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jcl
_honestly anybody with a good ear can pick that out_

According to the article, this specific chord has been debated for decades by
people with good ears.

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baddox
But what they've debated is the exact voicing and instrumentation (which
instrument played which part), NOT the notes of the chord. All this "debate"
seems to just be Beatles fanboys looking for a lot more cleverness and
complexity in Beatles music than really exists. As a huge fan of music and
music theory, and no huge fan of the Beatles, I can assure you that countless
abundantly more eluding, complex, and novel chords exist in other music.

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michaelneale
"see if he could apply a mathematical calculation known as Fourier transform
to solve the Beatles’ riddle."

I feel less dumb today knowing clearly exactly how that would work. Although I
would have thought it would in practice be feeding it into an audio analysis
app and picking the peaks and mapping them to notes on various tunings. Not
really mathematics though, but cool none the less.

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mattdennewitz
things like this make me giddy

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andr
Definitely not the way to hit on chicks that are Beatles fans.

