The dispute over who wrote the melody of “In my life” may have been finally resolved according to a Harvard study. The track was attributed to John Lennon, until Sir Paul McCartney claimed in the 70s that he actually penned the melody, leading to the dispute.
US and Canadian researchers have concluded that Sir Paul probably “misremembers,” because the song bears all the musical hallmarks of Lennon.
Senior lecturer in statistics of Harvard University, Mark Glickman, and professor of mathematics at Dalhousie University, Jason Brown, made a computer modelbreaking down Lennon and McCartney songs into 149 different components to determine the musical fingerprints of each songwriter.
Their results show that stylistically there is less than one in 50 chance of Sir Paul having written the music for “In my life.” Dr Glickman said, “We wondered whether you could use data analysis techniques to try to figure out what was going on in the song to distinguish whether it was by one or the other.”
“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 colour into its constituent components of red, green, and blue with different weights attached.”
Sir Paul claimed that the melody was written by him but the lyrics were John’s, to music writer and broadcaster, Paul Gambaccini. The words were written in reminiscence of Lennon’s childhood, with the original version being based on a regular journey he took, which passed Penny Lane and the Salvation Army children’s home, Strawberry Field. The song is number 23 on Rolling Stone’s, The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
