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Brown and his colleagues then built a model, using the known authorship of most Beatles songs, that could gauge whether a given song was a Lennon or McCartney creation. Called a “bag-of-words model,” Brown said, the technique has been used with text to compare different writers based on their tendency to use certain words.

Brown said the model correctly identified either Lennon or McCartney as the main author of each Beatles song about 80 per cent of the time. When it comes to In My Life, the researchers say there’s a less than two per cent chance that McCartney wrote the ballad. “I think we were surprised with the level of accuracy,” Brown said. The research has yet to be published in a peer-reviewed journal but will be presented at a conference in Vancouver this week.

Despite the results, Brown is unwilling to state categorically that McCartney had nothing to do with the song. “There could be a bunch of things going on,” he said. “It could be that Lennon did indeed write the whole thing. It could be that… perhaps Paul wrote some of it, but some significant part of it is written by John and that sort of overrides all.” He said it’s also possible McCartney played a larger role in writing the song, but it was later edited by Lennon. “It’s kind of hard to tell.”

Brown said this type of analysis can be used to help create music in the style of different artists, or to look for the influence of certain musicians in the work of others. “It’s a question of what makes authorship of a creative work. What are the characteristics that someone adds in to a poem or to a song that makes it uniquely them?” he said. “People think of music as entirely emotional, but it’s not. There’s a huge part of it that’s analytical.”

As for the Beatles, the fascination with John and Paul’s rivalry and the debate over which was the better songwriter will likely persist, nourished every time McCartney talks wistfully about a McCartney-Lennon credit. But Brown isn’t trying to put all those old arguments to bed. “I think I’m giving life to this question,” he said. “It’s a fascinating question and people should talk more about it.”

• Email: mforrest@postmedia.com | Twitter: MauraForrest