Paul McCartney: AI Has Enabled a “Final” Beatles Song
Freeman writes:
On Tuesday, BBC Radio 4's Today program aired an interview with Paul McCartney in which he announced that thanks to AI technology, a "final Beatles record" has been finished and will be released later this year. He said that AI techniques have isolated John Lennon's vocals from an old cassette tape demo, enabling him to complete the song.
Though McCartney did not provide the song's title, speculation points towards it being "Now And Then," a 1978 Lennon composition, which McCartney has mentioned wanting to finish in the past. In 1995, the three living Beatles considered including the song in their Anthology series (similar to "Free as a Bird" and "Real Love") but abandoned it due to quality issues and George Harrison's refusal to work on it. Harrison died in 2001.
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During the making of the 2021 Get Back documentary, composer Emile de la Rey and a team of engineers at Peter Jackson's Wingnut Films worked with machine learning researcher Paris Smaragdis of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to develop a neural network called "MAL" (Machine Assisted Learning, also a nod to Beatles roadie Mal Evans) to isolate voices and musical instruments in Beatles recordings. Similar vocal isolation allowed McCartney to virtually duet with Lennon on a recent tour.
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