AI helped Paul McCartney create final Beatles song

Updated on: 14 June 2023

Gintaras Radauskas
Senior journalist

Fans of The Beatles have been singing their famous songs over and over again for decades. Now, they’ll have a new song to learn. Thanks to artificial intelligence, a new tune is set to be released.

The exciting news that a new and final Beatles recording will be released later this year was announced by Sir Paul McCartney, who was interviewed by the BBC Radio 4 Today program.

McCartney, who, together with Ringo Starr, is one of the two living and musically active members of The Beatles today, said he had used new AI technology to “extricate” John Lennon’s voice from an old demo. This helped him to complete a decades-old song.

The musician didn’t name the song, but it’s thought to be a 1978 Lennon composition called Now and Then and made shortly before his assassination in New York. Lennon was shot in 1980, and his widow, Yoko Ono, gave several recorded songs to McCartney.

According to him, the idea to use AI and reconstruct the demo came from Peter Jackson’s eight-hour epic Get Back (the official Disney+ trailer is here). For the documentary, custom-made AI was used to recognize the Beatles’ voices and separate them from background noise.

The process allowed McCartney to “duet” with Lennon on his tour recently, including the slightly haunting performance at last year’s Glastonbury festival in the United Kingdom.

“Jackson 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.”

As Cybernews has already reported, controversy over the use of AI music has continued to mount since OpenAI’s ChatGPT, an AI-based chatbot, wrote itself into the tech history books.

For instance, fake profiles of Kanye West, the Weeknd, and Drake have received hundreds of thousands streams before detection. An English band Breezer also used AI to create a “lost” Oasis album – the project was actually praised by none other than former Oasis frontman Liam Gallagher.

AI helped Paul McCartney create final Beatles song

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