The opening chord of “Hard Day’s Night” has long been a topic of analysis. Recently, a Dalhousie math professor published what appears to be the final word on the subject, as written up in the Wired blog:
The secret sauce, as it turns out, includes five piano notes apparently played by producer George Martin.
It was already known that the chord included piano, but it was thought that there were three piano notes, not five. A couple things about this:
1) Okay, that’s great. There are five piano notes. Why is this a big deal?
2) How the hell is this just being figured out now? Fourier analysis has been around for centuries, and the FFTs that we use in algorithms to analyze a signal in frequency space have been around for decades. Maybe I’m missing something, but what took so long?