A new and final Beatles track is being created with the help of artificial intelligence, according to former band member Paul McCartney.
Due to be released later this year, the new track is speculated to be built on a preliminary recording of John Lennon’s “Now and Then” from 1978.
Lennon made the recording on an old cassette tape in his New York City apartment before he died.
His wife, Yoko Ono, later handed the tape (and other demos) labelled “For Paul” to McCartney. Two of the recordings were completed and released in the mid-90s: “Free As A Bird” and “Real Love.”
The third “new” Beatles track was initially considered but later put aside over problems with the audio, including background noise.
“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,” McCartney told Q Magazine.
“[But] George didn’t like it. The Beatles being a democracy, we didn’t do it.”
Now with AI, the voice of Lennon can be extracted from the tapes and reworked.
“We just finished it up, and it’ll be released this year,” McCartney told BBC4 on June 13.
Peter Jackson, director of the 2021 documentary series, Get Back, was able to “extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette,” McCartney said.
“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.’
“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.”
McCartney admitted using AI was “kind of scary but exciting because it’s the future.”
AI’s Role in Society?
The emergence of ChatGPT in recent times, a widely accessible AI-powered tool that can engage the public in all sorts of conversations, has spurred questions over the role of AI in society.
Key questions posed by the chatbot include what impact AI will have on employment, whether the information provided by AI Chatbots can be trusted, and broader, existential questions like whether AI will surpass or supersede humans (or achieve “singularity”).
A similar debate occurred in 1996 when scientists successfully cloned a female sheep, Dolly, leading to questions on whether the cloning of humans was next.
U.S. senators and governments in developed countries are investigating how to regulate AI’s development in the coming years.
In the creative space, AI is already used to create “music” and “art.”
For example, Freddie Mercury, the deceased lead singer for British rock band Queen, is singing renditions of Michael Jackson’s Thriller and Ed Sheeran’s Perfect on YouTube—although to the keen ear, the limitations of AI singing can be heard.
The situation has already led to legal issues over copyright. For example, visual media company, Getty Images, has sued Stability AI over illegally “scraping” or using its images to create its own works.
Generative AI works by “scraping” existing content to “train” itself on how to create new works, including poetry, visual art, and music.
Musicians Face ‘Battle’ in Coming Years: Sting
The former frontman for the band The Police, Sting, has warned musicians that they face a “battle” with AI in the coming years.
“That’s going to be a battle we all have to fight in the next couple of years: Defending our human capital against AI,” Sting told the BBC. “The tools are useful, but we have to be driving them.”
“I don’t think we can allow the machines to just take over. We have to be wary.”
He likened AI-generated music to CGI in movies.
“I get immediately bored when I see a computer-generated image. I imagine I will feel the same way about AI making music.”
Peter Tregear, the director of Little Hall at the University of Melbourne, has previously warned AI could spur even more rampant consumerism.
“It will be so much easier and cheaper to underscore visual material that it becomes ubiquitous,” Tregear previously told The Epoch Times.
“You see people walking around and basically wired in 24/7. They wake up to music, put in their headphones, and have their phone all day. Once they take it out, they’re in a shop which has music in the background,” he added.
“We need to change the curriculum that we teach kids from primary school onwards so that they are ‘sonically aware’ or empowered,” Tregear said. “Otherwise, we are just accepting it and are at its mercy.”
