Analysis, attribution and the Beatles

The collaborative workshop process that is usually part of a band’s compositional creativity means that it can be hard to disentangle which person is responsible for which style or element, and that there can be disputed claims of ownership, both creative and legal. Although the Beatles are the most canonical and best-studied pop composers of the twentieth century, there are still a number of songs to which members of the band are on record as inconsistently laying claim, assertions that are impossible to evaluate in documentary terms at this distance in time, and with memories becoming faulty. An established computational method is used here to examine and compare some of the melodic and stylistic components of Lennon and McCartney, in order to see whether clustering algorithms can provide insights into such authorship questions when working with score-based analysis.This article was published open access under a CC BY licence: https://creativecommons.org/licences/by/4.0.