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Paul McCartney misremembers writing 'In My Life', study suggests
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Sir Paul McCartney performs in concert on July 26, 2017 in Tinley Park, Illinois. (AFP/Kamil Krzaczynski)
Researchers may have finally uncovered who actually wrote the melody for The Beatles' song "In My Life".
For those who don't know about the dispute, John Lennon has always been attributed for the role on the band's 1965 Rubber Soul album; however, Sir Paul McCartney told broadcaster Paul Gambaccini in the 1970s that he was the actual writer of the melody. "Those were the words John wrote, and I wrote the tune to it. That was a great one", he said according to Telegraph.
Following a study that involves creating a computer model that analyzes the two musicians' songs written between 1962 to 1966 into 149 different components to determine each of their musical fingerprints, statistics senior lecturer at Harvard University, Mark Glickman, and mathematics professor at Dalhousie University, Jason Brown, have come to the conclusion that McCartney "probably 'misremembers' because the song bears all the musical hallmarks of Lennon".
Read also: Paul McCartney makes James Corden tear up in Carpool Karaoke
“The basic idea is to convert a song into a set of different data structures that are amenable for establishing a signature of a song using a quantitative approach. Think of decomposing a color into its constituent components of red, green and blue with different weights attached," said Glickman. “The probability that 'In My Life' was written by McCartney is .018., which basically means it's pretty convincingly a Lennon song. McCartney misremembers.”
Based on the study's analysis of features like chords, frequency and pitch, the researchers found that McCartney's songs have a more "complex and varied pitch", while Lennon's "did not change much at all".
Interestingly, the researchers also concluded that another song on the album, "The Word", should be attributed to McCartney instead of Lennon. (saz/kes)
