Do you agree that last year The Beatles released a number one single decades after the death of John Lennon, thanks to AI?

Like many songwriters back in the day John used a cassette recorder to capture his muse. In so doing his vocals and instrument and any other sounds are like one thing with no track separation.

The end result is better than earlier attempts for sure but that shouldn’t disqualify or discount the full human part of the creative process.

Lots of people seem to take the end result as an AI recording but it isn’t.

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All that being said, I don’t think you can thank AI per se here since The Beatles and others (Pink Floyd) have always used tech as a tool to help render what they want.

Not exactly thanks to AI but a thanks to the developers who were able to make an AI process that can isolate the different sounds in an undivided recording (mono basically).

As an aside I hope we never get to a point where AI makes separate Beatles material from machine learning. That wouldn’t be the band itself but a rehash of what the band did into something similar but not new - not original.

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In many ways double tracking via tape and backwards material and changing pitch at the tape recorder level all were and are the same kinds of things.

We had two previous attempts with isolation in Free as a Bird and Real Love - more or less attempting the same efforts to have a clear John vocal. The newer technique involving algorithms specifically created to learn: Oh, that is a voice and that is a piano etc took things over the top so you could really end up with just John’s voice.

But with the specific AI program used in making Now and Then, the producers were able to isolate John’s voice completely removed from everything else. This became the vocal track used to make the rest of the song.

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It might be that people like or dislike the idea of AI being the thing here but it is just a separate part of the process to deliver a clean Lennon vocal.