Paul McCartney narrated Today, the BBC Radio 4 show that artificial intelligence was used to put an old John Lennon demo into the latest Beatles recording. “We just finished it, it will be released this year,” Macca said.
McCartney did not name the song. Accordingly BBC it could be about now and thena 1978 demo recorded by Lennon that was already being considered for revision and included anthology mid 90s.
In fact, two Lennon demos were recorded in the ’90s, Free as a bird And real loveto which the living Beatles (then not only McCartney and Ringo Starr, but also George Harrison) added instruments and vocals.
This, of course, had the approval of Yoko Ono, who had given Macca her husband’s demos recorded on a portable recorder. Tried to work on it too now and thenhowever without obtaining satisfactory results. Jeff Lynne, who produced the unreleased Beatles, recalled, “The song had the chorus, but the verses were almost entirely missing,” there were sound problems, and Harrison didn’t particularly like it.
The turning point came recently when they wanted to clean up the dialogue of Peter Jackson’s documentary come backThe computer was trained to distinguish the four Beatles’ voices and instruments from other sounds.
“Thanks to artificial intelligence,” McCartney explained on the radio, “we were able to separate John’s voice and piano,” taken from the old demo. “And so we were able to take John’s voice from one of his demos and clean it up with this AI when we made the Beatles’ last record. So we can mix the record as usual.”
Artificial intelligence was therefore used to make Lennon’s voice sharper and clearer, rather than to restore it where it isn’t there. It’s a practice (we’ve written about it here) that McCartney says is “disturbing but exciting because it’s the future.” Lets see what happens.”
