McCartney said technology was used to ‘extricate’ John Lennon’s voice from an old demo which was used to complete the song.
Artificial intelligence has helped create a final Beatles song set to be released this year, its member Paul McCartney has said.
In an interview released on Tuesday by the BBC, McCartney said the technology was used to “extricate” John Lennon’s voice from an old demo which was used to complete the song.
“We just finished it up, and it’ll be released this year,” he said.
McCartney, 84, said the song was made with the help of film director Peter Jackson, using the same AI technology employed for the Beatles documentary Get Back.
During the making of that film, Jackson and his team were able to separate the voices from the instruments.
“We were able to use that kind of thing when Peter Jackson did the film Get Back,” McCartney said.
“He was able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette. It had John’s voice and a piano, he could separate them with AI. They tell the machine ‘That’s a voice, this is a guitar, lose the guitar’. And he did that. So it has great uses.”
McCartney did not reveal details of the demo, but the BBC reported it was likely to be an unfinished 1978 love song Lennon titled Now and Then.
The singer received the demo from Lennon’s widow Yoko Ono. The song is one of several songs that were included on a cassette labelled “For Paul” that Lennon recorded before he died in 1980.
The Beatles speak at a Tokyo news conference, June 1966. From left: Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and George Harrison [AP Photo]
AI is ‘scary but exciting’
McCartney says the AI technology was “kind of scary but exciting”, adding that “we will just have to see where that leads”.
Now and Then was previously considered a possible reunion song for The Beatles in 1995 when they worked on compiling an Anthology series. The band released two songs from Lennon’s cassettes, Free As A Bird and Real Love.
They also tried to record Now and Then, but the session was abandoned.
McCartney later said they did not continue because George Harrison, who died in 2001, “didn’t like it”.
“It didn’t have a very good title, it needed a bit of reworking, but it had a beautiful verse and it had John singing it,” he told Q Magazine in 2006. “[But] George didn’t want to do it. The Beatles being a democracy, we didn’t do it.”
