A Harvard statistician found a way to determine whether Paul McCartney or John Lennon wrote the songs

• Researchers team up to find out who wrote the songs of the Beatles between 1962 and 1966
• Divides the songs into data sets and attributes qualities to John Lennon or Paul McCartney
• McCartney found "miscremembers" writes "In My Life"

"The probability that" In My Life "was written by McCartney is 0.018."

"Which basically means it's a Lennon song."

And with that, Harvard researcher and Beatles fanatic Mark Glickman made his contribution to one of the eternal arguments of pop music pub – who wrote the Beatles' best songs?

The difference this time is that Glickman has science on his side

Professor of Mathematics at Dalhousie University – Glickman, Lecturer in Statistics, asked if John Lennon or Paul McCartney had written some of the most memorable pieces of Fab Four on cold data. 9005] The process for non-technical music lovers is much more banal than anything the Beatles – even Ringo – have worked on.

You can read more about this here, but the quick version is the pair hooked into the old Harvard. Student Statistics Ryan Song proposed a five-step method for breaking down each Beatles song from 1962 to 1966.

The idea, according to Glickman, was to convert songs into sets of data structures different. breaking down a color into its constituent constituents of red, green and blue with different weights attached, "Glickman says. 19659005 "We do the same thing with the Beatles songs, but with more than three components."

"In total, our method divides the songs into a total of 149 components."

The datasets included frequencies chords played fluently, notes sung by the singer, chords that followed each other, pairs of consecutive melodic notes, and whether the melodic sequences were "high and low" or "remains the same".

" Consider Lennon's song, "Help!", Says Glickman. "It goes as follows:" When I was younger, a lot younger than today. ", where the tone does not change much. It stays on the same note several times, and only changes in the short steps.

"While with Paul McCartney, you are taking a song like" Michelle ", and it's going on," Michelle, my beautiful. "

" In terms of height , it's everywhere. "

Of all this, the team had enough information to apply another three-step process to build a model for the likelihood of whether Lennon or McCartney has wrote a song.

And the first victim? "In My Life", from the 1965 Rubber Soul album – a song ranked 23rd out of the 500 greatest Rolling Stone songs of all time.

Although it is listed as a classic "Lennon-McCartney" track, Lennon McCartney has contested that in the past

But Glickman's model says that McCartney "is wrong"

He may however claim "The Word ", that Glickman thought to be a Lennon song.

Glickman will reveal more details about the study during a conf erence at the 2018 Joint Statistics Meetings, August 1 in Vancouver

He says that this is not limited to solving bitter pop debates

. Glowman says, "We can look at the history of pop and trace the flow of stylistic influence."

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