"I started playing guitar because I heard a Beatles record—that was it for my piano lessons," says Jason Brown of Dalhousie's Department of Mathematics and Statistics with a good laugh. "I had tried to play the first chord of the song many takes over the years. It sounds outlandish that someone could create a mystery around a chord from a time where artists used such simple recording techniques. It's quite remarkable."

Four years ago, inspired by reading news coverage about the song's 40th anniversary, Dr. Brown decided to try and see if he could apply a mathematical calculation known as Fourier transform to solve the Beatles' riddle. The process allowed him to decompose the sound into its original frequencies using computer software and parse out which notes were on the record. - It worked, up until a point

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