Mathematician solves “A Hard Day’s Night” chord mystery
None of the published tabs for The Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” get the famous first chord accurately. Jason Brown of Dalhousie’s Department of Mathematics figured it out by using a Fourier transform. He broke down the sound into separate frequencies and found out which notes were played.
It turns out there was a note in the recorded chord that doesn’t appear in the known sheet music for the song. In fact, the note cannot be played on a guitar simultaneously with the known chord. Brown then concluded that it was George Martin playing that newly discovered F note on the piano along with George on a 12-string Rickenbacker, Lennon on a six string, Paul on bass, and Ringo, of course, on drums.
It’s amazing to get any sort of Beatles news, let alone an actual discovery. And I love that it came from the world of math.
But why didn’t anyone attempt this method before? Couldn’t someone go into with Direct Note Access? (Direct Note Access claims that “for the first time in audio recording history you can identify and edit individual notes within polyphonic audio material.”)
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