“With a little help from AI”. Soon to be 81 years old, Sir Paul McCartney announced on Tuesday June 13 at the BBC microphone that he used artificial intelligence (AI) to produce what he calls “the last Beatles recording”. AI was used to “extract” John Lennon’s voice from an old demo to complete the title. “We just finished it and it will come out this year,” he said.

Paul McCartney did not specify which piece it is, but according to the BBC, it would probably be an unfinished track by John Lennon, titled Now and Then, recorded in 1978 as a solo piano-voice demo. It had once been considered as a potential single after Free as a Bird and Real Love, two other John Lennon tracks used to join The Beatles Anthology compilation project, released in installments from 1995.

In January 1994, Yoko Ono had sent Paul McCartney two cassettes containing models that John Lennon had never finished or marketed. Besides Free as a Bird and Real Love, the other two songs were Grow Old with Me and Now and Then. Work on this last piece never really started because George Harrison, who died in 2001, didn’t like it. According to the New Yorker, the author of Here Comes the Sun called John Lennon’s unfinished title “fucking rubbish.” Eventually, Paul McCartney resolved to bring it back to life.

The Beatles at the forefront of innovation

The association of AI and the Beatles could make people cringe when many artists are already worried about the use that will be made of artificial intelligence. Paul McCartney, however, considers the phenomenon “very interesting”: “It’s something that we are all trying to understand at the moment, trying to understand what it means. »

In fact, an AI has already been used by Peter Jackson to make the documentary The Beatles: Get Back, released in 2021. Dialogue editor Emile de la Rey used an AI to recognize the voices of the Beatles and separate them from the noises of background, thus making private conversations filmed in 1969 audible, recalls the Guardian. “You teach the computer what a guitar sounds like, (…) human voice, (…) drums, (…) bass. So we can take a mono track of them [The Beatles] at Twickenham playing and we can say, “Give us the vocal track.” And machine learning will only render a vocal track,” Peter Jackson told Guitar magazine. “So you’ll see Ringo in the background playing the drums, but you won’t hear the drums. The big step forward for us was therefore not to restore the images, even if that is what we are obviously looking at, but the sound. »

Before Peter Jackson and the AI, the Beatles themselves never shied away from pushing the boundaries of sonic innovation with feedback on I Feel Fine, fuzz pedal on bass for Think for Yourself, loops on Tomorrow Never Knows, the Automatic Double Tracking or ADT (automatic track doubling) used on several titles of Revolver (1966) or the recording of the bass in the console to give it a more raw sound, as during the sessions of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967).