A ‘new’ Beatles song is coming, with a little help from AI – National | 24CA News
Thanks to the assistance of synthetic intelligence, the Beatles are (type of) getting again collectively.
Paul McCartney instructed the BBC Tuesday {that a} new Beatles music is ready to be launched this 12 months, and it’ll function John Lennon’s voice.
“When we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John had that we worked on,” McCartney defined to Radio 4’s Martha Kearney. “We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI so that then we could mix the record as you would normally do — it gives you some sort of leeway.”
According to the outlet, McCartney was given considered one of Lennon’s demos by his widow Yoko Ono. It was recorded on a cassette labelled “For Paul,” which was reportedly recorded not lengthy earlier than his demise.
McCartney mentioned that when director Peter Jackson was making his 2021 docuseries, The Beatles: Get Back, the manufacturing crew was capable of separate Lennon’s voice from the background utilizing AI expertise.
Jackson was “able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette and a piano,” McCartney mentioned. “He could separate them with AI. He’d tell the machine, ‘That’s a voice, this is a guitar, lose the guitar.’”
The similar expertise enabled McCartney to “duet” nearly with Lennon, who was shot to demise in 1980 in New York City, on I’ve Got a Feeling final 12 months on the Glastonbury Festival.
McCartney didn’t identify the brand new music, however it’s prone to be a 1978 Lennon composition referred to as Now and Then, which was included on the demo cassette.
According to the BBC, the band beforehand tried to document Now and Then, however McCartney mentioned George Harrison refused to work on it as a result of the sound high quality was “f—ing rubbish.”
“It didn’t have a very good title, it needed a bit of reworking, but it had a beautiful verse and it had John singing it,” he instructed Q Magazine.
“(But) George didn’t like it. The Beatles being a democracy, we didn’t do it.”
However, McCartney has expressed his want to complete the music within the years since.
The use of AI in music (and on the whole) has triggered a lot controversy lately, because it’s now doable to make use of the expertise to imitate voices and music kinds. According to The Guardian, streaming companies are continuously scrubbing music from their websites that imitate artists like Drake, Kanye West and the Weeknd.
McCartney described AI expertise as “kind of scary but exciting,” including: “We will just have to see where that leads.”
— With a file from The Associated Press
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