The music world was shaken last week with the news that former Beatles member Paul McCartney had used AI technology to complete an unfinished song by fellow bandmate John Lennon. The song, titled “Now and Then,” was started in the 1970s after the Beatles had already split, but remained unfinished after failed attempts to complete it in the years following Lennon’s death.
McCartney said he had used AI to isolate Lennon’s vocals from a cassette recording of a demo version of the song and separated them from piano music, thus “getting” Lennon’s voice “pure” through artificial intelligence. “Then we can mix the record as you would normally do. So, it gives you some sort of leeway,” McCartney said in a radio interview.
This isn’t the first time AI technology has been used by the Beatles. Last year, AI was utilized on the reissue of their Revolver album, and also for the three-part documentary Get Back, which allowed instrumental and vocal tracks to be separated from original tapes, allowing for conversations and performances to be recovered and restored.
The use of AI in music production is on the rise, with machines learning how to perform tasks such as writing reports, generating art, and even creating songs with accuracy. However, the development of AI that mimics human intelligence has led to debates over ethical issues linked to the controversial technology.
McCartney admitted that AI is “kind of scary” but also expressed that it has “great uses”. The decision to release the AI-assisted version of “Now and Then” is yet to be confirmed.
This news comes as the Beatles are set to release a new song this year, using cutting-edge technology to extract John Lennon’s voice from an old demo recording. This will be the band’s first original material since releasing “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love” in the mid-90s, both of which were created using crackly demos recorded by Lennon in the late ’70s.
The upcoming Peter Jackson documentary, Get Back, features restored film footage of the band’s iconic rooftop performance in 1969, and the unnamed song has been referred to as the band’s “final Beatles record.” Jackson used AI technology to restore and improve the quality of the audio track.
The Beatles are considered one of the best-selling musical acts of all time, with estimated album sales of 600 million. A new neural network called “MAL” (Machine Assisted Learning) has been developed by researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to isolate voices and musical instruments in Beatles recordings. MAL uses machine learning techniques to enable individual audio elements to be identified and isolated, re-synthesizing them in a way that matches trained samples of those instruments or voices in isolation, even when recorded on the same tape. The technology has been used to create source separations of the original master tapes of The Beatles’ 1966 album Revolver.
In conclusion, the use of AI in music production has opened up new possibilities for refining and restoring past musical works. While it may not be without controversy, there is no doubt that the technology will continue to play a role in the music industry moving forward.
