Val Wilmer/Redferns
Val Wilmer/RedfernsIn a 1970s interview, Paul McCartney claimed that he was responsible for the entire melody of the Beatles classic “In My Life,” although John Lennon, who penned the tune’s lyrics, had maintained that McCartney only wrote part of the music. Now, an academic report using statistical analysis has concluded that Lennon was indeed likely responsible for the tune’s main melody.
According to U.K. newspaper The Telegraph, researchers analyzed various Beatles tunes credited jointly to Lennon and McCartney, but whose authorship was disputed by the songwriters. Harvard University statistics lecturer Dr. Mark Glickman and Jason Brown, Professor of Mathematics at Canada’s Dalhousie University, devised a computer model that broke down the songs into nearly 150 components to ascertain characteristics that could be specifically attributed to each songwriter.
The results? There’s a very small statistical chance that McCartney wrote the melody of “In My Life.”
“The probability that ‘In My Life’ was written by McCartney is .018,” says Dr. Glickman in the report. “Which basically means it’s pretty convincingly a Lennon song. McCartney misremembers.”
One difference the researchers found between the songs written by Lennon and those written by McCartney is that in John’s tunes, the pitch does not change much, while in Paul’s compositions, there’s a great deal more complexity and variance on the pitch.
“Consider the Lennon song, ‘Help!’…It stays at the same note repeatedly, and only changes in short steps,” Glickman explains. “Whereas with Paul McCartney, you take a song like ‘Michelle.’ In terms of pitch, it’s all over the place.”
But the study also concluded that the music for the Beatles song “The Word,” which has been attributed to Lennon, was almost definitely written by McCartney.
The research was presented over the weekend at the American Statistical Association’s 2018 Joint Statistical Meetings in Vancouver, Canada.
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