Meanspeed® Music Review

Let It Be - The Beatles - Contemporary tempo map by menaspeed music public school - LET IT BE 5

Let It Be is shown in these speed charts by the performers The Beatles. The theme of this song is simple: the answer to vexation and worry in life is to “let it be,” for answers will come in a spirit of grace on their own. This is the soft spoken secret: the answer is to let things happen, for worry only leads to trouble, and the definition of worry is being upset about an event about which we have no control. IN the song, though many people the reference to the biblical character of Mother Mary, this is in fact a reference to Paul McCartney’s Mother Mary. Both Lennon and McCartney’s moms had died while the two future-Beatles were children, and this loss help form a special bond between the two men.
This song was recorded for the Beatles’ final album, Abbey Road. McCartney had a dream one night in which he was paranoid and anxious. His mother, also called Mary, had by the time of the composition’s genesis had been dead for 10 years, yet she appeared to him in a dream, literally speaking words of wisdom that brought him the grace and peace he sought.
John Lennon thought the song had too many Christian and religious overtones (“what are we going to next, Hark The Herald angels Come?”). Lennon made sure that the next song on the album was “Maggie Mae,” a song about a Liverpool prostitute.
The phrase “let it be” is sung by Sir Paul 36 times in the studio version of the song. If you listen carefully in the beginning, you can hear Ringo pick his sticks up.

The definition of the word Grace, which you just showed, is etched in my mind from Webster’s Collegiate: 1a: “unmerited divine assistance given humans for their sanctification and renewal.” The key: no expectation by the assistance provider to be “paid back” in any way. Simply, a disposition to be generous and helpful and merciful, especially where a situation does not demand it had happened, and I will always be moved by those two weeks. Let It Be, recorded without aid of electronic device to keep time, is a song that descends from 75 to 68 beats a minute. An idea of how universal this idea is strange came to me when I was buying some cookies at an Asian owned and operated food store here in New York City in 1996. The Korean man at the counter saw the chart for Let It Be, and to my surprise said, “I had no idea that song got slower as it went along.” I was (a) a glad he could read the chart so quickly and easily, (b) surprised that he knew a deceleration of a live song was rare. Spiking up to near the Meanspeed (77.459…beats per minute, as the mentioned in the Theory section, formula of the square root of 60 beats times 10, or the square root of 60 seconds divided by 10 as a frequency .77459 seconds between every beat) for a measure or two near the beginning Let It Be’s first half is almost all between 70-75 beats per minute, while the second half steadies out, continuing to slowly decelerate, between 68-70 beats per minute. The church-like cadence at the end brings the song, and the Beatles, to a merciful close.The mean speed/objective tempo= 70.6 beats per minute.
The average beat= 850 milliseconds.
The beat frequency = 1.177 beats per second.
The mean slow phase, the speed of the song expressed as cycles per second= 1.177 Hertz.
The corresponding pitch= 301.23 Hertz in equal temperament, 43 cents above D4=293.665 Hertz, and 57 cents below D#4/Eb4=311.127 Hertz.The graphs are based on a spreadsheet generated with this method:
a) I calibrated groups of every single measure (four quarter-notes) ten times with Seiko 300-lap stopwatches;
b) Ten trials were averaged, coordinated and synthesized.
I created the speed graph in Microsoft’s Excel for MacIntosh 2004 on an Apple iBook G4 as hardware. One of the graphs derived from the results, in a radar graph style was printed on an Epson CX4600, scanned on same printing device.

The numerical coordinates are available upon request.

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Let It Be - The Beatles - Contemporary tempo map by menaspeed music public school

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Meanspeed Music Public Education

August 12,2009