The artificial intelligence used to solve the controversial generics of the Beatles' successes

The controversial origins of the Beatles hits, written under the writing partnership of Paul McCartney and John Lennon, could be put to bed by artificial intelligence (AI) software to identify the musical influence of each artist.

Harvard University researchers in the US have developed a machine learning algorithm on hundreds of Fab Four hits to create a "musical fingerprint" for each songwriter.

It was then asked to evaluate eight iconic songs, or fragments of music, recorded between 1962 and 1966, where the debate was raging as to who was the main influence.

This includes titles such as "A Hard Day's Night" and "In My Life", which are attributed to the "Lennon-McCartney Partnership", but are widely considered to be entirely written by either of them.

The results, published in Harvard Data Science Review, to evaluate the influences of each artist on the song and to predict the likelihood that it will be McCartney or Lennon.

As recently as 2015, Sir Paul McCartney expressed his frustration at what he sees as a "revisionism" for his influence over that of Lennon after his assassination in 1980.

He went so far as to knock down the credits of the song to read "McCartney-Lennon" in a 2002 album – to the annoyance of Lennon's widow, artist Yoko Ono.

It was anticipated that most of the eight contested author songs would be in Lennon's style, including titles such as "Ask Me Why" and the "A Hard Day's Night" bridge that McCartney sang and suggested in previous interviews. where he had played a role.

"In my life", which Rolling stone ranked magazine, in 2011, the 23rd^rd The biggest song of all time has "garnered as much speculation about its true author," the researchers said.

Lennon wrote the lyrics of the song, but McCartney said he wrote all the music, which Lennon's story challenges.

The algorithm determined with 81.1% certainty that Lennon had written the verse, but the influence of McCartney in the bridge of the song was given with a certainty of 43.5%.

This would corroborate Lennon's story that Paul contributed to the eighth song's melody.

"By separating the song into verse and bridge separately, it is obvious that the verse is much more stylistically coherent with the writing of Lennon's song," wrote the authors.

Other songs like "Baby's in Black", "The Word" and "From Me to You" were more confident than those of McCartney with a certainty of up to 97%.

This system allows to study the evolution of the influences of each musician over time, as well as the collaborative nature of songwriting in popular music.

According to the findings of the study, McCartney's work "tends to use more non-standard music patterns" in his songs, with the increased complexity of the song being a "distinctive feature" of his songs.