Paul McCartney reveals new AI-assisted Beatles song featuring John Lennon’s voice

Thanks to AI, the British pop group The Beatles can release one last song, says band member Paul McCartney in an interview. It is probably a song that band member John Lennon recorded a few years before his death and that has had poor sound quality to this day.

The song will be released this year, says McCartney volgens The Guardian. With the help of AI, it is now possible to isolate John Lennon’s voice from the recording with mediocre sound quality. That audio can then be mixed separately in combination with new instrumentation.

It is probably Now and Then, a song that Lennon recorded as a demo in 1978. Lennon died in 1980. Fifteen years later, the three living Beatles were working on new songs using old Lennon recordings. From that came the songs Free As A Bird and Real Love, but Now And Then did not make it and remained on the shelf.

The Beatles team has long been using AI to isolate voices and instrumentation. This was used, among other things, for the documentary Get Back from 2021. For the audio of that documentary, the Wingnut team created an AI tool called MAL that the employees trained on the voices of the individual Beatles. As a result, they were able to isolate and make audible the voices in the documentary, while they could not be heard in the original recordings. The AI ​​was also used for the remix of last year’s Revolver album.