A pair of researchers say they’ve solved the controversy over which Beatle wrote the song “In My Life,” which both John Lennon and Paul McCartney claimed to have written alone.
The New York Post reports that Harvard statistician Mark Glickman and Dalhousie University mathematician Jason Brown have been examining a number of Beatles songs credited to Lennon and McCartney that are considered to have “disputed authorship,” with the credit belonging to either Lennon or McCartney, but probably not both.
“They’re using ‘stylometry’ — the type of statistical analysis that famously rooted out the identity of the Unabomber — to solve another pressing question: Which songsmith really wrote all those Lennon-McCartney songs?” The Post reports.
In the case of the 1965 ballad “In My Life,” from the album “Rubber Soul,” the researchers believe it was written by Lennon.
In a press release, Glickman said: “The probability that ‘In My Life’ was written by McCartney is .018.”
The Post adds: “By taking into account a number of musical signatures — including Lennon’s affinity for simple melodies and McCartney’s use of more varied tones — he and Brown were able to determine that ‘it’s pretty convincingly a Lennon song.’”
Fascinating. And very interesting as well. If Paul was a probability of 0.18 John was a probability of 99.82. I’d lean toward saying that’s pretty “definitive.”
I think i this case, 100% would be a probability of one, or 1.000, so here it’s .018 for Paul and .982 for John. Either way it is pretty staggering.
Why not just ask Paul? He would know wouldn’t he?
Read the first sentence of the article again.
Or you can just listen to it, and know 100%.
John and Paul are the lead singers on the songs they wrote.
“…statistical analysis that famously rooted out the identity of the Unabomber…”
Well that pretty much blows their credibility… seeing as how the Unabomber was turned in by his own family and the preponderance of physical evidence as to his identity/guilt required zip statistical analysis for verification.
What was it Mark Twain said about the three types of lies…