McCartney: ‘Within the year we will release the last Beatles song, thanks to AI’

“We just finished the job. It will be published within this year”. Paul McCartney has announced the release of a new song to the BBC. “The Beatles’ last song”, as he called it himself. A work created thanks to artificial intelligence, which would have “extracted” John Lennon’s voice from an old demo. It is currently unknown which song the AI ​​got Lennon’s voice from. But, according to the BBC, it is likely to be a 1978 composition, Non And Then.

It is not the first time that the former Fab Four have announced the possible publication of Non And Then. But so far it has been difficult to complete that work. BBC recalls that McCartney had received a demo in 1994 from Yoko Ono, widow of Lennon. A cassette, labeled by Lennon “For Paul”, which the singer allegedly recorded shortly before his death on December 8, 1980. ‘Low fidelity’ recording, with Lennon at the piano in his New York apartment, which he felt the refrain, but little more. “We tried to complete it, but we didn’t agree whether to do it or not. George Herrison didn’t like it and the Beatles are a democracy, so we decided not to do it”.

The role of artificial intelligence

And this is where Artificial Intelligence comes in. The turning point, the BBC explains, came with Peter Jackson’s documentary Get Back, where dialogue editor Emile de la Rey trained computers to recognize the Beatles’ voices and separate them from background noise, and even their own same tools, to create “clean” audio. The same process has enabled Sir Paul to ‘duet’ with Lennon on his recent tour, and to create new mixes of the Beatles’ Revolver album last year.

“Jackson was able to extract John’s voice from a small piece of poor quality tape,” explained McCartney. Then a clarification on the process: “In the tape we had John’s voice and a piano. He could separate them with the artificial intelligence. It basically tells the machine, ‘This is the voice. This is a guitar. Take the guitar off and just isolate the voice.'” “So when we started making what’s going to be the last Beatles record,” he continued McCartney.

However, the musician admitted that other applications of AI have given him cause for concern. it’s just AI. It’s kind of scary but exciting, because it’s the future. We’ll just have to see where it takes us.”