Paul McCartney says new Beatles record features AI John Lennon

The “last” Beatles record is being made using artificial intelligence. Paul McCartney says audio engineers were able to extract John Lennon’s unfinished song from an old demo, decades after the band broke up. The new song is set to be released soon.

|
Scott Garfitt/AP/File
Paul McCartney poses for photographers upon arrival for the premiere of the film “If These Walls Could Sing” in London, Dec. 12, 2022. Artificial intelligence has been used to extract John Lennon's voice from an old demo to create the last Beatles record.

Artificial intelligence has been used to extract John Lennon’s voice from an old demo to create “the last Beatles record,” decades after the band broke up, Paul McCartney said Tuesday.

Mr. McCartney, an octogenarian, told the BBC that the technology was used to separate the Beatles’ voices from background sounds during the making of director Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary series, “The Beatles: Get Back.” The “new” song is set to be released later this year, he said.

Mr. Jackson was “able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette and a piano,” Mr. McCartney told BBC radio. “He could separate them with AI, he’d tell the machine ‘That’s a voice, this is a guitar, lose the guitar’.”

“So when we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John had that we worked on,” he added. “We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI so then we could mix the record as you would do. It gives you some sort of leeway.”

Mr. McCartney didn’t identify the name of the demo, but the BBC and others said it was likely to be an unfinished 1978 love song by Mr. Lennon called “Now and Then.” The demo was included on a cassette labeled “For Paul” that Mr. McCartney had received from Mr. Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, the BBC reported.

Mr. McCartney described AI technology as “kind of scary but exciting,” adding: “We will just have to see where that leads.”

The same technology enabled Mr. McCartney to “duet” virtually with Mr. Lennon, who was murdered in 1980, on “I’ve Got a Feeling” last year at Glastonbury Festival.

Holly Herndon, a multidisciplinary artist with a doctorate in composition from Stanford University, used nascent AI machine technology on her last album, 2019’s “Proto,” and developed Holly+, an online protocol that allows the public to upload tracks to be reinterpreted and performed by a deepfake version of her voice. She theorizes that the Beatles’ recording was likely created using a process called “source separation.”

“Source separation has become much easier to do with machine learning. This allows you to extract a voice from a recording, isolating it so that you might accompany it with new instrumentation,” she explains.

That differs from a deepfake vocal. “A deepfake is an entirely new vocal line spawned from a machine learning model trained on old vocal lines,” she said. “While it does not appear to be happening in this example, it is now possible to spawn infinite new media from analyzing older material, which is a similar process, in spirit, to this song.”

Mr. McCartney is set to open an exhibition later this month at the National Portrait Gallery in London featuring previously unseen photographs that he took during the early days of the Beatles at the start of “Beatlemania,” when the band rose to worldwide fame.

The exhibition, titled “Eyes of the Storm,” showcases more than 250 photos Mr. McCartney took with his camera between 1963 and 1964 – including portraits of Ringo Starr, George Harrison, and Mr. Lennon, as well as Beatles manager Brian Epstein.

This story was reported by The Associated Press. AP writer Maria Sherman reported from Los Angeles.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Paul McCartney says new Beatles record features AI John Lennon
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/The-Culture/Music/2023/0616/Paul-McCartney-says-new-Beatles-record-features-AI-John-Lennon
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe