«Now and Then»: Can we revive the Beatles with AI?
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 Published On Aug 15, 2023

When it was announced that ex-Beatle Paul McCartney was going to release a new Beatles song with the help of artificial intelligence, there was great astonishment among music fans. The basis for this release is "Now and Then", a song that John Lennon recorded on an old cassette shortly before his death. Later, the surviving band members Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr added additional instruments and voices. But these recordings remained unreleased for decades, in part due to the inferior sound quality of Lennon's original cassette. But now, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence, or AI, the vocals and piano could be separated and the song professionally mixed. Here, AI shows its best side by improving the sound quality. However, the entire creative output - the music, the lyrics, the vocals - still comes from humans.

But this raises questions: What happens when AI also takes over the creative work? NZZ video editor Florentin Erb wants to create a Beatles song consisting exclusively of AI-generated elements. In three steps, he makes the impossible possible and revives the Beatles: Using a tool from Facebook called MusicGen, which generates music using keywords, he first creates a backing track. Then he uses chat GPT to generate lyrics for the song. Finally, he uses AI to craft a melody for the lyrics, which are then sung by an artificial Beatles voice.

#beatles #artificialintelligence #music

CONTENT:
00:00 Intro
00:32 The new Beatles song "Now and Then".
01:27 Can we revive the Beatles with AI?
03:33 Replacing voices with AI
04:23 AI in the music industry
05:10 Creating lyrics with ChatGPT
05:54 Vocals for our AI Beatles song
06:59 How AI will change the music industry
07:33 The result

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