An AI-assisted Beatles song is on the way, according to Paul McCartney.
The music legend told BBC Radio 4’s Today of the plan to finish “the last Beatles record” using artificial intelligence. Specifically, AI has been used to pull John Lennon’s vocals from a demo for a song on the now-finished album, which will be “released this year”.
“When we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John had that we worked on,” McCartney told presenter 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. So there’s a good side to it and then a scary side and we’ll just have to see where that leads.”
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According to the BBC, McCartney received Lennon’s demo from his widow Yoko Ono on a cassette labelled “For Paul”. The news outlet reported Lennon had made it not long before before he was fatally shot outside his home at the Dakota in New York on Dec. 8, 1980.
McCartney said the possibilities of using AI with the Beatles archive came to his attention through Peter Jackson’s documentary film The Beatles: Get Back, an eight-hour look into the making of the album Let It Be through more than 60 hours of behind-the-scenes material.
“[Jackson] was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette — it had John’s voice and a piano,” he said. “He could separate them with AI, they could tell the machine ‘that’s a voice, this is a guitar, lose the guitar’ and he did that. So it has great uses.”
The use of AI in music has become a contentious issue and point of concern in the music industry. For one, Spotify is cracking down on AI music, removing thousands of AI-generated songs in May.
High profile artists are dabbling in AI already, however. A highly popular AI-generated song with simulated vocals from Drake and The Weeknd rattled the industry, and Grimes is inviting artists to use her voice in AI songs, even saying she’ll split the royalties 50/50.
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HYBE chairman Bang Si-Hyuk told Billboard he thinks AI-generated music is the future of K-pop, saying, “I have long doubted that the entities that create and produce music will remain human.”
As McCartney said, “We’ll just have to see where that leads.”
