Analyzing “A Hard Day’s Night”
Now this is fascinating:
‘Hard Day’s Night’: A Mathematical Mystery Tour
Saturday, December 27, 2008 – The jangly opening chord of The Beatles’ hit “A Hard Day’s Night” is one of the most recognizable in pop music.
Maybe it sounds like nothing more than a guitarist telling his bandmates, “Hey, we’re doing a song here, so listen up.” But for decades, guitarists have puzzled over exactly how that chord was played.
So a mathematician in Canada looked into how The Beatles produced that sound back in 1964, before the synthesizers and studio electronics available today.
“Sounds themselves are very mathematical things,” Devlin says. “And that was the key to unraveling this particular mystery of this sound.”
Using sound-wave analysis based on the 1820s work of French scientist Joseph Fourier, Dalhousie University’s Jason Brown deconstructed the opening chord with the help of basic audio-editing software. Brown found that it isn’t purely guitar and bass, as previously assumed; he theorizes that Beatles producer George Martin played a five-note chord on the piano as well.</em>
Incredible story. Read Brown’s paper “Mathematics, Physics and A Hard Day’s Night” here.
Is this vitally important to the world today? Nah. Is it arrestingly interesting to music geeks like me? You bet- partly because it shows yet another facet of the amazing talent that was the Beatles. Put another way, I doubt anyone will be analyzing anything from here in 44 years.