Paul McCartney is jumping on the Artificial Intelligence bandwagon. It’s been decades since fans received a song from The Beatles, but McCartney is making the unimaginable possible with the help of AI.
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The hitmaker recently sat down with Radio 4’s Today Programme to reveal that the “final” Beatles song will be AI-generated. It is expected to arrive later this year. The advanced technology enabled McCartney to pull John Lennon’s vocals from an old demo to curate a new track.
The legend pulled Lennon’s recognizable sound from the track “Now And Then.” McCartney received the demo from Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, in 1994. According to BBC, the song was included on a cassette tape titled “For Paul.”
McCartney worked closely with Peter Jackson, the filmmaker behind Get Back – a documentary about the band, to execute the final product. The crooner knew Jackson was the man for the job, as he used specific technology while creating the mega-doc to differentiate their voices from one another.
“He [Jackson] was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette,” explained McCartney to the outlet. “We had John’s voice and a piano, and he could separate them with AI. They tell the machine, ‘That’s the voice. This is a guitar. Lose the guitar.'”
He continued, “So when we came to make what will be the last Beatles’ record, it was a demo that John had [and] we were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI. Then we can mix the record, as you would normally do. So it gives you some sort of leeway.”
The “Here Comes The Sun” singer admitted that the track is officially done. “We just finished it up, and it’ll be released this year,” McCartney confirmed.
Although AI allowed McCartney to expand The Beatles’ extensive catalog, he confessed that the technology is still “scary.”
“It’s kind of scary but exciting. It’s the future. We’ll just have to see where that leads,” noted the songbird. “I’m not on the internet that much [but] people will say to me, ‘Oh, yeah… there’s a track where John’s singing one of my songs.’ And it’s just AI.”
McCartney is far from the first musician to experiment with AI. Singer-songwriter Grimes announced in late April, that she would welcome AI-generated songs with her voice. Music Radar reported that 60% of musicians are already using AI in their production.
Photo by Samir Hussein/WireImage
