McCartney 'misremembers' writing 'In My Life' – Harvard analysis says

And they discovered that, stylistically, there is less than one in 50 chance of Sir Paul having written the music to ‘In My Life.’

“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," said Dr Glickman.

“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.

“The probability that 'In My Life' was written by McCartney is .018. Which basically means it's pretty convincingly a Lennon song. McCartney misremembers.”

‘In My Life,’ is ranked 23 on Rolling Stone's The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.

Lennon wrote the lyrics in reminiscence of his childhood years, with the original version based on a regular bus journey he took which passed Penny Lane and the Salvation Army children’s home Strawberry Field. However he later reworked the song to be a broader look back at his youth.

Sir Paul claimed to have set Lennon’s lyrics to music, after being inspired by songs by Smokey Robinson & The Miracles. Yet up to his death Lennon said only the ‘middle-eight’ and harmonies were Sir Paul's work.

For the study researchers ‘decomposed’ Beatles’ songs written between 1962 and 1966, analysing features such as frequency of chords, chord transitions, melodic notes and pitch.

They found a major distinction. While the pitch of Sir Paul’s songs was complex and varied, Lennon’s did not change much at all.

"Consider the Lennon song, 'Help!'" added Dr Glickman. "It basically goes, 'When I was younger, so much younger than today,' where the pitch doesn't change very much.

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