(London) More than 50 years later, the four boys in the wind are back: an unreleased Beatles song recorded using artificial intelligence to recreate the voice of John Lennon will be released this year, Paul McCartney has announced.
While the possibilities of AI arouse fears and envy in the music industry, the musician of the legendary band from Liverpool, who is about to celebrate his 81st birthday, explained in an interview broadcast on Tuesday by the BBC that the voice of Lennon had been taken from an old cassette.
She was separated from the musical accompaniment thanks to new technologies to realize this new song.
“We came to do what will be the last Beatles recording, it was a demo of John that we worked from,” “Macca” explained.
“We just finished and it’s going to come out this year,” he added.
“We managed to take John’s voice and purify it using AI to mix the recording,” he continued.
In April 1970, six months after the release of the album Abbey Road and one month before that of let it be, the Beatles have announced their separation. The ten years of common life of Paul McCartney, John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr gave 14 successful albums, nearly a billion records sold and the shooting of several films.
Despite the deaths of Lennon in 1980 and Harrison in 2001, “Beatlemania” remains fierce across the world and the possibilities offered by AI have already given fans attempts to bring them together, or revisit the latest works of Paul McCartney with his youthful voice.
“Very interesting” phenomenon
It was when asked about these developments that McCartney revealed the preparation of this new song which he did not name.
The BBC believes it is “probably” a composition by Lennon from 1978, called Now and Thenalready considered for a compilation in 1995.
It was featured in a tape titled For Paul recorded by Lennon shortly before his assassination in New York in 1980.
The appearance of AI in the music industry poses enormous financial and ethical questions. The process is used to recreate works by renowned musicians. Fake works by artists like Eminem, Drake, The Weeknd or Oasis have been created using artificial intelligence.
British singer Sting recently predicted a “battle” by artists to “defend our human capital against AI”.
“You can’t let the machines take over, you have to be careful,” said the 71-year-old former singer of The Police. “Maybe for electronic music it works. But for the songs, which express emotions, I don’t think I will be moved,” he added.
For his part, Paul McCartney considered the phenomenon “very interesting”: “It’s something that we are all apprehending at the moment, trying to understand what it means”.
The musician, author notably of Yesterdaythe most broadcast song in the XXe century, remains hyperactive with a rich solo career. He became again last year, a few days after having blown his 80 candles, the oldest headliner of the legendary English festival of Glastonbury.
He was speaking Tuesday on the occasion of the opening at the end of June of an exhibition of 250 unpublished photos of the Beatles that “Sir Paul” took at their beginnings, in 1963 and 1964, at the National Portrait Gallery in London.