By Alexandra Lopez Petalas, Year 11
The Beatles’s “new” song, Now and Then marks a huge leap in the music industry. In 1978, John Lennon started writing the song, but unfortunately the band never finished it. Now, enabled by artificial intelligence, the song has been finished and published.
In 1994, John Lennon gave Paul McCartney a cassette with the words “For Paul” on it. Some of the songs on this cassette became top 5 hits in the United Kingdom at that time. One of the songs on that cassette was Now And Then. The band tried to finish it, but unfortunately, they could not reach a decision on how to end it. AI technology has used John Lennon’s vocals and George Harrison’s guitar parts to complete the song. McCartney and Ringo re-recorded their parts and AI was used to piece it all together.
None of the band members could have predicted what would happen with this song. The reason that they never finished it was that on the demo tape- from the cassette that Lennon gave McCartney- the piano was very loud and therefore made it difficult to hear the other instruments and vocals. Now that we have the technology to separate different instruments and parts of the song, the band confessed that it was easier for the song to be fixed and finished. Lennon’s voice was extracted from the demo tape and we can now hear it in the song. This was made possible by machine-learning-assisted audio restoration. This means that with the development of statistical algorithms, data (in this case, John Lennon’s voice) is analyzed and used to make new data of the same kind (new lyrics but in Lennon’s voice). This technology also removes imperfections in the song such as background noise, crackles or flutters that could be heard in recordings.
There is no surprise that completing this song brought up many nostalgic memories for the band. For example, Ringo Starr said that “it was the closest we’ll ever come to having [Lennon] back in the room.” McCartney also struggled with an ethical issue: was it right to finish John Lennon’s songs? McCartney would imagine asking this of Lennon and he was sure that the answer would have been yes.
So what does this mean for the music industry? The Beatles have been a very influential band for many, many years and have inspired a multitude of young people to pursue music careers. They have made music history countless times in the past and what they have done with the song “Now and Then” has been revolutionary. Some of the band members have given their opinion on the technology and have described it as “scary, but exciting”. It is one of the first and only songs to be worked on with artificial intelligence and from the results and feedback following this song, many more bands and artists will follow in The Beatles’s footsteps. We do not know what will happen in the future, if this will become normal, if people will not use AI to finish their songs or if songs will be made solely with AI.
