More than 50 years after the Beatles broke up, Paul McCartney has said artificial intelligence helped create the final Beatles song to be released later this year.
McCartney said in an interview that the song was created using a demo featuring John Lennon’s voice. BBC Radio 4 interview It was released on Tuesday. He gave no clues about the song’s title or lyrics.
“When we tried to make what would be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John had and we worked on it,” McCartney said. “Through this AI, we were able to extract John’s voice purely, so we could mix the record like normal.”
Holly Tesler, a senior lecturer on the Beatles at the University of Liverpool, said in an interview on Tuesday that speculation was that the song was “Now and Then,” a song written and recorded as a demo by John Lennon in the late 1970s. said there is.
Lennon was shot and killed outside his New York apartment in December 1980. John, Ringo Starr, and George Harrison, who died in 2001, were working on the Beatles Anthology, and McCartney was given the tape by his widow, Yoko Ono. -Retrospective documentaries, chronicles and book series.
The other two songs on this tape, “Free as a Bird” and “Real Love”, were later completed by the three surviving Beatles using Lennon’s original voice recordings and recorded in 1995. and was officially released in 1996.
It’s unclear exactly how McCartney used the latest demo, or if it incorporates new lyrics.
Using AI technology to create music with the voices of famous artists has raised a number of ethical and legal issues around authorship and ownership over the past few months.
Earlier this spring, an AI-produced song called “Heart on My Sleeve” claimed to use the voices of Drake and The Weeknd and went viral on social media before being registered with Universal Music Group. Tracks similarly created (including tracks using) AI version of Rihanna covers Beyoncé song Another one with AI vocals. Kanye West covers ‘Hey There Delilah’ Keep getting more views on social media.
Other artists are also embracing this technology. In April, producer and pop singer Grimes called on everyone to use their voice to create AI-generated songs. The results were mixed.
Proponents of the technology argue that it has the power to disrupt the music business in the same way that synthesizers, sampling and file-sharing services have.
McCartney’s use of AI technology may attract new fans, but it could also alienate old fans and Beatles purists, Tesler said.
“If John were alive, there would be no way to know from a creative point of view what he would do with these works, or what he would do with his contribution,” she said, adding that it was an ethical gray area. added that it produces
Throughout McCartney’s career, she said, he was quick to work with new creative technologies, whether it was synthesizers or samplers.
“I think he just wants to know what it can do,” Ms. Tesler said of McCartney. “So, from this, given what his heart is and what his creative priorities are, and with so much of the music industry at his fingertips, his choice was to work with John Lennon. You can see that it’s about completing the demo, and in a way it’s very emotional.”
