Math Prof Uncovers Secret Chord 177
chebucto writes "The opening chord to A Hard Day's Night is famous because for 40 years, no one quite knew exactly what chord Harrison was playing. Musicians, scholars and amateur guitar players alike had all come up with their own theories, but it took a Dalhousie mathematician to figure out the exact formula. Dr. Brown used Fourier transforms to find the notes in the chord, and deduced that another George — George Martin, the Beatles producer — also played on the chord, adding a piano chord that included an F note impossible to play with the other notes on the guitar."
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That David played, and it pleased the lord,
but you don't really care for music, do you?
Not, but it's the craptastic idle design that's really chapping my ass.
Craptastic (Score:2)
see that the narrow com-
ment field is still in place.
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I came here to make exactly that post, and I find that someone's already done it. Kudos to you.
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It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah...
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Unfortunately it's now generally attributed to Rufus Wainwright. Better than nothing I suppose...
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And before that people assumed Jeff Buckley wrote it.
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Jeff Buckley was born to sing that song.
Unfortunately, he died shortly after.
Anyone else cringe when they heard that sublime work of Cohen used in a silly movie like Shrek?
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I knew of it thanks to Sad Kermit.
Re:I've heard there was a secret chord (Score:4, Funny)
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The only shreks I've ever seen around here had frickin laser beams attached to their heads!
Re:I've heard there was a secret chord (Score:4, Funny)
The baffled king determined to carry on a joke well past the breaking point.
Well, this isn't total crap (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Well, this isn't total crap (Score:5, Insightful)
the problem is that /. designates idle to be full of crap. all of the good articles get shoehorned into other categories. For example, the article about how Heinlein responded to fans with a preformed checklist was under entertainment. Something like that is much better suited to idle and it would make the section worth reading.
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This is interesting, but the CSS used is still obnoxiously bad.
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hmmm -- take a flute and a tuba. There are cords they can play together that neither can play alone. That is a big DUH!
Musicians have known this for ages; nothing new here...so the 'discovery' in that context is meaningless.
The fact that the good doctor was able to identify the cord is not meaningless in and of itself - and allows guitarists to relax and not go crazy trying to do something that is clearly impossible alone. Plenty of meaning there.
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I probably should have said pipe organ and sitar....
Umm... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why didn't anyone just ask Harrison?
Re:Umm... (Score:4, Insightful)
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What? (Score:2)
great, now he can start working on (Score:1)
Simple Solution (Score:1, Redundant)
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Re:Simple Solution (Score:5, Funny)
You want to talk to a human -- a musician -- when you could be performing a discrete Fourier transform? You must be new here.
Re:Simple Solution (Score:4, Funny)
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Ranking the options on the geek scale:
Asking someone for the answer: Easy -, boring -, requires human interaction ----. Rating -40.
Doing a discrete Fourier transform on a digital recording: Technical +, challenging +, mathematical +, cool +, involves a computer and no human interaction ++++. Rating 50.
Getting the answer from the mind of a dead body: Technical+, extremely high challenge value ++, requires Nobel Prize Winning new breakthrough in science +++, requires an actual science lab outfitted with cutt
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go ahead and ask him. see what he says.
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Also, who said that all the instruments were played at the same time. Maybe in final editing it was decided that the starting chord needed something more and it was only at that point the piano was added. For all we know (nothing) the musicians may not have known themselves there was a piano added.
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So, having RTFA... (Score:2)
Well, perfesser, what the frell's the chord?
Re:So, having Googled... (Score:4, Informative)
There are like a million copies of this article verbatim and with the same picture. Here's his page http://www.mscs.dal.ca/~brown/ [mscs.dal.ca]
and then find these:
http://www.guitarplayer.com/story.asp?sectioncode=8&storycode=15819 [guitarplayer.com]
http://www.mscs.dal.ca/~brown/AHDNSoloJIB.pdf [mscs.dal.ca]
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This Is What "Idle" Should Be Used For. (Score:5, Interesting)
Stories like this are actually interesting and have a math/science side to them, instead of being mindless humor that everyone has already seen elsewhere. This is something that a math teacher could show her students to make them interested, more so than all the silly posters and videos they used when I was going through grade school.
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Looks like some crappy teeny-bopper who thinks he knows everything there is to know can't accept the truth that some opinions might differ from his.
Oblig XKCD (Score:2)
Ah grasshopper, one day you will be ready to leave
www.xkcd.com/339
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Actually, I'd never heard of them before and found the whole idea that people couldn't figure out what chord he was playing rather interesting, and I have no real interest in music, either.
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That's a patent falsehood. You see, I despise the beatles.
I know, I know. Shocking. I also think Led Zeppelin sucks, too. Further, I cannot stand Aerosmith.
Combining all 3 of them is my own personal hell. Write it down, make a note of it. Someday, when I die, and I go "what the shit? God actually exists? oh man, this does not end well for me", and I sometime after God says "what the hell are you doing here", that's where I'll spend eternity. Listening to the Beatles, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, all su
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Note: 'S
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Pink Floyd (a little later, but still), The Who, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, and many many more. I also cannot stand the Rolling Stones (as the your sibling poster was able to point out and that I oddly agree with!) But I've been known to roll through youtube chaining a ton of hippy rock songs from time to time. I also tend to do this with punk (both old school and the stuff from the 90's, but the new stuff is a barrel full of crappy monkeys imo)
All the same, there's a ton of music I dig. It's just th
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I never said they didn't. But when somebody says "everybody" - you know, an explicitely inclusive statement - then I just had to point out that I did not. Which meant his statement is false.
If the GGP had said "damn near everybody" or "almost everybody", then I wouldn't have said a thing, but everybody means everybody.
Not Lost, just Secret (Score:5, Funny)
The Moody Blues have been in search of that little bastard since 1968. Can someone call them and tell them it was finally found?
Re:Not Lost, just Secret (Score:5, Funny)
They wouldn't know what to do with it anyway. They're just singers in a rock & roll band.
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Hey, veteran cosmic rockers like them would know just what to do!
Hang on. (Score:1, Troll)
I've always known there was a piano in the song. It's actually kind of hard to miss if you ever played one before.
But then again, I do have hearing that's sharper than most. at age 26 I can still pick up about 25+KHz frequencies.
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I can hear frequencies above 25kHz. Just ran another test and so far I'm able to easily hear 28kHz tones. Get to about 30kHz and it's just pressure in my ears, no tone.
Not so secret (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Not so secret (Score:5, Informative)
Not really, the piano is playing a Dsus4.
If it was as simple as you say it is then people would have been able to recreate it long ago and no one did.
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Maybe it sounds better with the piano though.
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The guitars are playing an F with a G on top, the bass is playing a D at its second octave and the piano is playing the notes D-G-D across an octave...
Beats me what that is called...
But that's the point... A weird sort of dissonance that gives a signature sound.
They were probably really high at the time.
Just to wait for RockBand to have the song (Score:5, Funny)
Right guy, right song, wrong story (Score:5, Informative)
Dr. Brown's work on the opening chord of Hard Day's Night is four years old. His paper is at:
http://www.mscs.dal.ca/~brown/n-oct04-harddayjib.pdf [mscs.dal.ca]
(Note the "oct04" date in the URL).
His recent work is on the same song, but it's not about the opening chord. It's about the guitar solo (which was actually a duet with the piano), which Harrison played an octave down, at half speed, and then sped up. Which he proved by noticing where the piano notes went from double-strings to triple-strings, as seen by tiny mis-tunings between the strings.
It's pretty interesting work:
http://www.mscs.dal.ca/~brown/AHDNSoloJIB.pdf [mscs.dal.ca]
(Note: slashdot is just reporting the article, which is new. But it comes from Dr. Brown's own school, so I don't know why they're reporting the wrong story, except to guess that the older story was a well-known mystery among guitarists.)
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So What's the chord? (Score:5, Informative)
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It's a piano. No guitar has the 'punch' that a piano has. Listen to the song, put the bass up a little higher than normal. It REALLY stands out.
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Beatles fans might find Alan Pollack's notes on every Beatles song ever very interesting. Try his comments on Hard Days Night [icce.rug.nl]
The impossible note (Score:3, Interesting)
...adding a piano chord that included an F note impossible to play with the other notes on the guitar.
There are no notes that are impossible to play on a guitar. However, you have to tune the guitar to a nonstandard, non eagbde like Led Zepplin did on a few songs (an example is Black Mountain Side [wikipedia.org] on their first album.
I have an incredibly hard time playing a B chord; I have to kind of fake it and not hit all the strings. But then I'm no virtuoso, it took me twenty years to learn Starway To Heaven.
Re:The impossible note (Score:5, Funny)
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"Sure there are. You can play at most six notes at once on a guitar; besides that, there are plenty of notes that are off the bottom of the guitar's range."
That's assuming it's a six-string guitar, and it's tuned normally, neither of which are necessarily valid assumptions. Especially considering George did not play a six-string guitar (although, admittedly, a 12-string isn't that much different from a six-string, it just doubles 2 strings exactly and 4 of them an octave higher).
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Dude [photobucket.com]...
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Oops, massive brainfart!
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Well, that explains it. It's kind of hard to play a seven note chord on a six stringed instrument!
But since the Beatles had two guitar players...
From Wikipedia (Score:2, Redundant)
Opening chord
"A Hard Day's Night" is immediately identifiable before the vocals even begin, thanks to George Harrison's unmistakable Rickenbacker 360/12 12-string guitar's "mighty opening chord".[12] According to George Martin, "We knew it would open both the film and the soundtrack LP, so we wanted a particularly strong and effective beginning. The strident guitar chord was the perfect launch"[8] having what Ian MacDonald calls "'a significance in Beatles lore matched only by the concluding E major of "A D
Nobody thought to look at the frequencies?!?!?! (Score:2)
So let me see if I got this straight: for 40 years Beatles fans have been fighting over what combination of frequencies were used in this chord, but not one of them thought to check what frequencies were being used in the chord until now?
For non-EEs out there, a Fourier transform is a basic algorithm to translate from the time domain to the frequency domain. Any audio program or player or graphic equalizer that displays the frequency spectrum instead of the actual wave coming out the speakers is using this
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Graphic equalizers often cheat, actually.
I think the problem is a little more interesting than the story makes it out to be. As you point out, you should be able to recognize the overall chord pretty easily with an FT, but it's not quite as trivial to figure out who's playing what. For that you have to analyze the ratios of the harmonics, which turns into a nasty little decomposition problem when you've got more than one instrument playing the same note.
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Very different if you play one, look at it, then play the other. A little more difficult if you have a recording of a couple of guitars and a piano all playing multiple notes simultaneously.
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When involve ins a 'religous' war no one likes to check for any fact, it might mean they're wrong.
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What about live performances? (Score:3, Insightful)
What did he play in concert?
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShrdKHeAel0 [youtube.com]
Look for yourself.
It's all in the algorithm (Score:2)
Mystery? Yeah sure buddy... (Score:2)
I find the premise of this story too difficult to believe. Anyone with a decent ear can hear what is going on; close your eyes and listen to the song, and you will hear beyond a doubt the twelve string and also the piano. There is no mystery there, and careful listening would allow anyone to pick out individual notes in the chord--musicians do this all the time, to the point of memorizing chord sequences by ear and what notes they contain. Also, one second on youtube showed me live footage of Harrison actua
Pride Goeth Poof (Score:2)
"...an F note impossible to play with the other notes on the guitar."
For every tuning? Every string is independent and can be tuned to any note. Nor does a given string position require that the normally used string be installed there. And just because it's a 12 string doesn't mean the secondary strings have to be tuned to the note, octave, or any given relationship since they're equally independent. All 12 positions can be filled with any string and that string tuned anywhere within the range in which it m
Nominate this guy for an Ig Nobel award (Score:2)
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I don't get it. Why did it take me less than 30 seconds to figure out how to make anything Idle related disappear from the index, even though I'd never tried before? Please, leave the pointless bitching out off the commends. You know it's lame, we know it's lame, since it is a complete waste of time. Why let it be a complete waste of disk space, cycles and bandwidth?
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When you get right down to it, why are any of us here?
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Because he didn't WANT to make the Idle stories disappear from the index, he just wanted to find out HOW because GGP was bitching about it.
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Q: What to accountants use as contraceptives?
A: Their personalities.
(-:
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They did that joke in the first post, dude.
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Its kinda late for that, Pythagoras was the original music math overlord
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That's [wikipedia.org] nothing [wikipedia.org] new... [wikipedia.org]