Fun with Fourier transform!

The story behind the famous opening chord of "A Hard Day's Night" has been floating for a while (long before this), and I've been meaning to post about it, but NPR did a nice piece on it this morning. Jason Brown, a mathematician at Dalhousie University, did what he calls 'musical forensics' on the chord. He shows that it wasn't merely George Harrison's 12-string Rickenbacker that gave it that remarkable voice, but George Martin hitting a piano chord at the same time. (His paper is available at the second link above.)

What finally prompted me to post was the kicker at the end of the radio broadcast: He's going to use musical forensics now to try something way more ambitious:

Brown isn't done with his musical sleuthing, either. Devlin says that Brown is now using Fourier-based analysis to determine who wrote certain Beatles songs whose true authorship is in dispute, such as "In My Life."

The kind of core acoustic analysis in the Hard Day's Night case seems relatively straightforward, but you gotta wonder whether it's possible to tease apart composing styles between two guys who were working together so closely for so many years. At any rate, it's cool.

Loser friendly and alt country punning

Language-oriented blogs haven't plowed the rich soil that is country music very much, though Geoff Pullum's note on Language Log almost a year ago is striking, quoting "a contemptuous Bob Newhart joke about country music":

I don't like country music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like country music, denigrate means ‘put down’.

As Pullum points out: "Once again, it's vocabulary size as the measure of intelligence and wisdom and culture, isn't it?" Direct vocabulary building is for SAT overachievers and such of course. It's like getting muscles in the gym: Some stuff you should come by honest (OK, -ly, if you want), through clean hard work. If you've ever taught languages, you know that vocab tests don't tell you much. A better indication of skill is creative use of language, the ability to play with it.

Country artists trade constantly on how they play with language. If you don't listen to country, or the revival of real country artistry known as "alt.country", "No Depression" and by other names, you're probably thinking of work like the Bellamy Brothers':

If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?

Or maybe songs like Bobby Bare's that pun endlessly on truck, trucker, truckin', see esp. compound forms in mother. As much as I love those classics, the new guys are cold brilliant.

I thought about this topic while listening to David Ball's "Loser Friendly", from his album Amigo (he got known first as part of Uncle Walt's Band, I think.) It's set in a bar, like the Derailers' brilliant "(I'm) Takin' a bar exam" and a million other songs. The pun on user friendly is easy enough that the phrase is certainly part of general usage now (it has an Urban Dictionary entry). But, man, does he work that little pun hard for a few verses — sadly, the lyrics aren't on-line and I haven't transcribed them. But I can smell stale beer.

Then, minutes after hearing Ball, Banjo & Sullivan came on. They are masters of this art, like the particular song:

"I'm At Home Getting Hammered (While She's Out Getting Nailed)"

See here for the full lyrics.

What does it take for poetic genius to be recognized?

Patti Smith on Elizabethian lyric

Just heard Patti Smith doing a radio interview (she's coming to Madison soon) and she was praising a lyric (no idea what — I came in after the antecedent was established) this way:

The lyrics are so beautiful they're almost Elizabethian.

If you don't know her as a heart-attack serious poet, only as a 'punk singer', the whole content may surprise you. But two other angles got me. First, I'm somewhat surprised that she thinks of Elizabethan as the standard of lyric beauty. Second, the adjectival form made me jump: Why not just Elizabethan? Probably a performance error, although her form gets a fair number of g-hits.