Dog Day Afternoon: Games Beatles Play

“A Day in the Life” is well-known as the final track on the ultra-famous 1967 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band album, and considered by many fans and critics alike to be the best song on the album. Backed by a 40 piece orchestra, it features both John and Paul sharing the duties on lead vocals.

While the song has been picked apart for all its unique attributes, one feature of “A Day in the Life” has gone largely unnoticed by fans, and totally unheard by fans for that matter. The song has a short section of audio that only dogs can hear.

The section in question is one of high frequency 15 kilohertz tone and randomly spliced Beatles studio chatter.

Of course, the “dog rumors” persisted for years, claiming that the Beatles purposely put in those sounds as a joke so that it would aggravate the dogs of people listening to the album who would be clueless as to why their dogs were agitated. Finally, in a 2013 interview with Zane Rowe of the BBC, Paul addressed the dog rumors. He confirmed the longstanding rumor:

“I think vinyl is the best. It just sounds good,” he said. “I asked my engineers why it sounds good and they explained that there are frequencies above and below that you can’t hear. We got into a rap with George Martin a long time ago. We’d talk for hours about these frequencies below the sub that you couldn’t really hear and the high frequencies that only dogs could hear. We put a sound on ‘Sgt Pepper’ that only dogs could hear. If you ever play ‘Sgt Pepper’ watch your dog”