Credit: Ray
Sir Paul McCartney shares some of the comments he made about the use of AI on the forthcoming Beatles album.
The legendary singer revealed to the BBC that AI technology was used to extract and clean up an old recording of John Lennon’s voice from a previously unheard track. “We just finished it and it’s going to be released this year,” McCartney said in that interview.
During that interview, McCartney revealed that director Peter Jackson was instrumental in giving the old recording a clear voice. “[Jackson]was able to get John’s voice out of a flimsy piece of tape that had John’s voice and a piano on it,” explains McCartney. “He could separate them with AI – he could tell the machine, ‘That’s the voice, that’s the guitar – lose the guitar.’ And it did, so it has great uses. We could take John’s voice and clean it through that AI, so we could then mix the record like you normally would.”
But as the media spread the story, the use of AI in the production of the final track clouded things over a bit. Now the legendary singer takes to Twitter to clarify what’s and isn’t happening.
“It was great to see such an exciting response to our upcoming Beatles project. Nobody is more excited than us to share something with you later in the year,” he says begins. “We’ve seen some confusion and speculation about this. Seems to be a lot of guesswork out there. I can’t say much at this point, but to be clear, nothing was created artificially or synthetically. It’s all real and we all play on it. We cleaned up some existing recordings – a process that has been going on for years. We hope you like it as much as we do. More news will follow in due course.”