They get by with a little help from…artificial intelligence? The Beatles, perhaps the most legendary musicians of all time, are back in the headlines despite breaking up more than 50 years ago. The newly released recording, billed as The Beatles’ final song, now has a music video, and both elements utilized technology unavailable in those heady days of Beatlemania. This is another sign of how AI is becoming more integrated into the fabric of our lives.
As we learned in June, the song, titled “Now and Then,” was written and sung by John Lennon shortly before his assassination in 1980. Lennon sat at a piano in his New York apartment at the Dakota and recorded the rough track on a boom box.
Paul McCartney received the demo tape from Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono in 1994. The surviving members of the Beatles attempted to record the song in the mid-1990s, but quality problems forced the band to shelve this idea, although McCartney praised Lennon’s vocals and the song’s “beautiful verses”.
The Beatles, who outlived Lennon, worked on the song over the years. George Harrison died in 2001, but McCartney and Ringo Starr continued the work.
For Thursday’s release, a double A-side single combines “Now and Then,” seemingly the Beatles’ final song, with the very first, the band’s 1962 debut single, “Love Me Do.” In a press release, the surviving Beatles call this “a truly fitting full-circle counterpart.”
The accompanying video for the song was released on Friday. It is a four-minute mix of archive recordings of the Beatles and current recordings of the living Beatles Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr. In some scenes, the two surviving Beatles are mixed with videos from their heyday, making it seem as if a young Starr and McCartney are playing music and mugging for the camera right alongside their 80-year-old selves.
Watch the Beatles’ “Now and Then” video
As with the song itself, not everyone likes the video time jump. Britain’s Telegraph calls it “horrifying” and an “act of digital necromancy.” But many of the fans who commented on the video on YouTube apparently didn’t see it that way.
“Seeing this makes me realize how much I’ve missed the Beatles over the years!” wrote one.
Another wrote: “The icing on the cake is listening to (the song) while watching the video just brings tears to your eyes. Congratulations to everyone involved in producing the song and video; a fantastic achievement and a worthy tribute.” “
No question, it’s a little unsettling to see the two late Beatles joking and playing music with their old pals, especially in scenes with a beaming, dancing John Lennon. Director Peter Jackson said that the lack of suitable footage almost stopped him from making the video, but that he was comforted by the contributions of everyone involved.
McCartney and Starr shot new footage of themselves, Apple Records found 14 hours of old film, and former Beatle Pete Best found a never-before-seen performance video.
What helped me get to grips with the video tricks is the fact that Lennon’s son Sean and Harrison’s widow Olivia both sent in old home movies. Hearing Lennon’s purified voice is one thing, but seeing the two Beatles and knowing they are gone leaves viewers in a state of shock. With all of the modern advances in technology, the one thing we can’t do is bring back our deceased loved ones – and yet that’s pretty much what’s happening here.
I’m not sure I’ll always support the use of such technology – I remember the disturbing commercial in which the late Fred Astaire appeared to be dancing with a vacuum cleaner. But Astaire’s widow agreed to it, and I feel reassured knowing that Lennon and Harrison’s families are okay with the Beatles video.
The use of technology – whether AI or not – in the audio part bothers me even less. Lennon’s voice wasn’t fake: he’s singing to himself, and the technology simply clears things up and gives a famous singer one last song.
It may be the least controversial use of AI in the music industry.
Over the last year we have seen the rapid and stunning arrival of generative AI, best known in its ChatGPT form, which responds to the prompts we give it with startlingly human responses. While it’s not the only type of AI out there, it’s raising fears of potentially dire scenarios – will it replace writers, artists and musicians? – as much as it is praised for the good it can do.
But AI in its other forms has long languished out of sight and, for the most part, in uncontroversial ways. For example, it processes photos on your smartphone or gives you wording prompts when you write a text message. It is also an emerging tool for making music.
What happened to AI and music?
AI is increasingly being used in the music industry, although not everyone is a fan of it. In early 2023, singer-songwriter Nick Cave described an AI song written in his style as a “grotesque mockery”. But others, including musician and filmmaker Taryn Southern, who spoke to CNET in 2022, are curious too. Southern used the technology to create her 2018 album I Am AI. An artificial intelligence program wrote the music, with Southern contributing lyrics and melodies.
The debate about how AI will shape the future of music will become increasingly difficult to avoid. Time Magazine compiled its list of the 100 most influential people in AI this summer and included two musicians. One of them, singer-songwriter Holly Herndon, created a vocal deepfake of herself, Holly+, in 2021. She has extensively trained a neural network on her voice, and the result can now be used by other artists.
Indie artist Grimes also made the list. This year, Grimes released AI software called Elf.Tech that allows other people to “sing through their voice.” Time says it “encouraged musicians to release songs using it, provided they share royalties with it.”
The fact that music is so deeply personal to creators and fans could create resistance to even the word “artificial” coming anywhere close to describing the art form. But we can hardly avoid it anymore. Big players like the Beatles and the Grammy Awards are now included, and it’s no longer so easy to dismiss AI in music as emotionless and robotic.
The Beatles song: AI to what degree?
McCartney told the press in June that an AI program was used to separate Lennon’s vocals from background noise and clean up the sound. He paid tribute to Jackson, the Lord of the Rings director who worked with McCartney on the 2021 documentary series The Beatles: Get Back. McCartney said Jackson used AI to “free John’s voice from a flimsy piece of tape.”
Beyond that, the details become a bit blurry. A New York Times article goes into more detail, reporting that the specific audio technology used was WingNut Films’ machine audio learning, known as MAL, which Jackson used to isolate musical elements in the Beatles documentary. (Machine learning, in which computers themselves recognize patterns, is an element of AI.) Herndon, meanwhile, suggested in an AP story that working on the song involved “source separation,” which, she said, “has become a lot “. easier with machine learning.”
And as the Times noted, no artificially created sounds were used to represent Lennon’s voice or piano playing. Instead, the technology was simply used to clarify the original performance.
Musical use of AI
Another song made headlines this year and sparked a deeper debate about AI in music.
The song Heart on My Sleeve, released in April by an anonymous creator who goes by the name Ghostwriter, used AI to mimic Drake and the Weeknd’s vocals. This is probably closer to what most people think of when they hear about AI and modern music. None of the stars whose voices were imitated had anything to do with the song.
Still, it wasn’t like an AI engine picked up Drake and the Weeknd songs and just spit out a copy. “Heart on My Sleeve” is mostly original, written and recorded by humans. However, AI vocal filters were actually used to imitate the two musicians’ voices.
A Ghostwriter representative said: “Ghostwriter attempted to match the content, delivery, tone and phrasing of the established stars before deploying AI components.”
The Grammy Awards complicate matters
The Ghostwriter song might not have made waves if Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. hadn’t initially told the Times that the song was up for a Grammy and then backed down.
Mason initially said, “As far as the creative side goes, it’s totally suitable because it was written by a human being.” But days later, he said on Instagram that the song was out of the question because the vocals weren’t from the label or the artists was released, was not “legally acquired” and the song itself was not commercially available. (Back in April, Universal Music Group, the parent company of the Weeknd and Drake’s label, requested it be removed from major streaming services.)
But the Grammys ballot was released in October, and the Recording Academy confirmed in an email to CNET that Heart on My Sleeve was indeed on it. Ghostwriter told Billboard that a new version of the song that didn’t use AI voice filters was uploaded to streaming services just days before the awards show was due to end.
Musical opinions differ about AI
McCartney has admitted that he is somewhat wary of AI. “I’m not on the internet that much, [but] People will say to me, ‘Oh yeah, there’s a track where John sings one of my songs,’ and that’s just AI, you know?” McCartney said. “It’s kind of scary but exciting because it’s the future. We’ll just have to see where this goes.”
The ghostwriter now has ideas about where this could lead. He told Billboard that he believes a business model can be worked out that is fair to artists whose voices are used without permission.
“I think in the near future we will have an infrastructure that allows artists to not only license their voice, but also do so with permissions,” Ghostwriter said. “Suppose I am an artist that can have such permissions. I think that’s the direction we’re going.”
It’s hard to argue against rewarding original artists — or keeping hate speech out of their mouths. But there’s no doubt that such changes will be hotly debated, especially since independence is so valued in music.
If, like me, you were raised to support musicians fighting for control of their own art – Prince writes “slave” on his cheek and changes his name to a symbol to protest Warner Music’s control over his name and his Music to protest – you will definitely be nervous about what exactly this AI path predicts. I saw Terminator and War Games.
However, it is unlikely that we will encounter real killer robots or nuclear weapons in the music sector. The ghostwriter’s statement is more positive than one would expect from someone so obviously pro-AI. Artists deserve to be paid, and they certainly deserve to have their voices not spread hate speech. And they’re also unlikely to sit back and accept unfair portrayals. Just look at the anger that arises when an artist’s song is played at a political event they disagree with.
My first reaction when I heard that AI was coming to music was to assume that trading artistic freedom for money and so-called progress was a bad idea. But every change always has gradations. I can only find good things about eliminating the ambient noise in John Lennon’s apartment to track down the voice of the lost Beatles.
The Beatles are shopping
The idea of using modern technology to enhance older recordings can take some getting used to. But it seems the two surviving Beatles are fans of the trial.
A 12-minute music video detailing the making of Now and Then was released on YouTube and Disney Plus on Wednesday. In it, McCartney ponders whether Lennon would have wanted them to finish his song. His decisive answer: “Yes! He would have liked that.”
Lennon’s son Sean echoes McCartney, saying: “My father would have loved this because he was never afraid to experiment with recording techniques.”
Drummer Ringo Starr describes the ability to work with his late bandmate’s vocals as “over the top”.
There’s an eerie moment when McCartney calls for isolating his late partner Lennon’s voice from the piano music and distracting house noises that filled the original tape. And the legendary voice sounds, clear and familiar, old and yet new.
McCartney says: “We’re actually experimenting with cutting-edge technology, which the Beatles would have been very interested in.”