I listen to a lot of music and can be a bit of a snob if you really get me going. The best way to start an argument with me is to complain when an artist tries something new. I recently saw the Arctic Monkeys play at Forest Hills and noticed some of the fans complaining that Alex Turner sounds a bit different. His voice has slowed and gotten a lot more melodic over the past 10 years. Because of this, the band has experimented a lot with different sounds. It’s good music but it’s not AM, their best album according to many fans… but that’s the point. Why bother to continue creating art if you’re not gonna try anything new? Hence the name of their first album: Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not.
The Final Beatles Song
It began in 1995 with some unfinished recordings from the late John Lennon. His widow, Yoko Ono, gifted his cassettes to the remaining three members of the band at the time. Of course, they wanted to finish the tracks, but as Paul McCartney put it, the piano was a little hard to hear and would cloud the picture over Lennon’s voice. So they left it unfinished.
27 years later, the remaining two members of the band came back to the recording after they saw what Peter Jackson was able to do on The Beatles: Get Back.
Large sections of that footage had been marked as unusable because the band’s conversations were drowned out on the mono audio tapes by the sound of their instruments: John, Paul, and George had deliberately hidden their sensitive discussions from the original doc crew by noodling on their guitars. Jackson asked the engineers at his production company, WingNut Films, to see what they could salvage, and so they developed their own machine-learning “de-mixing” software capable of splitting up interlocked sounds. It worked so well decoupling music from speech on the Let It Be audio tapes that Get Back, which had been planned as a two-hour film, grew into an eight-hour TV miniseries - How Peter Jackson Broke Up the Beatles And used AI to make Revolver better than ever, Vulture.
MAL, the name of the de-mixer the team developed, was able to splice the recording, separating the vocals from the piano using existing vocal samples, generating layers over weaker recording segments with synthesized approximations of the voice. Imagine trying to make a magenta paint but all you have is red, blue, and white. You can mix together different amounts of the three, layering countless amounts of paint, until you get as close as you can. It’s not exactly Lennon’s voice, but it’s as close as it can get.
Once they had the vocals and piano separated, Paul recorded a base. He sent it off to Ringo, who then added the drums. Then they added strings, and a guitar solo from Paul in the style of George based on what was left from their first attempt at the track in ‘95. Suddenly, they had themselves a completed song out of a synthetic collaboration.
Now and Then is on track to hit No.1 in the U.K. and would be the band’s 18th number-one single. While we’ve seen other AI tracks go viral, like Drake AI’s Heart on my sleeve (it slaps), this marks a turning point where a legacy artist not only used AI but embraced it. Paul McCartney has shown that artists shouldn’t be afraid of AI but instead should learn to use it because it will always be just another tool. The more personalized, the better.
Personal Agents
This week, OpenAI held its first developer event where they announced a bunch of new features. Among them was the announcement of GPTs:
OpenAI announced that it will let users create their own versions of GPT for fun or productivity use cases. Users will be able to build these bots just through prompt without needing to know any coding. The company will also let enterprise customers make internal-only GPTs built on top of the company’s knowledge base. - Everything announced at OpenAI’s first developer event, TechCrunch
This announcement did 2 things: (1) it opened up Pandora’s box for anyone to create any chatbot for any subject they want, and (2) it killed most AI startup ideas (mine included) determined to build ChatGPT for their area of focus. The addition of enterprise customers is also a game changer as many companies today are reluctant to let their employees use ChatGPT at work due to privacy issues and inaccurate information. Instead of pestering your coworkers on Teams waiting for a reply on what the name of that data file is again (I’m still waiting), you can just ask the chatbot preloaded with all the company info you need. This announcement also cements OpenAI as essentially the AI app store, allowing users to post and share their personal bots for others to use (will there be revenue share?).
We’re still early here. Most people don’t use ChatGPT or are even aware of what OpenAI is doing. Similar to how the app store was such a foreign concept at the launch of the iPhone, this marketplace approach to AI is the first step to making the technology as ubiquitous as the smartphone. The best part is that it all can be built using no code, stripping away the barrier to entry even further.
Thank you
If you didn’t know AI was used to generate Lennon’s voice for the track, would you have even noticed? Does it even matter? It’s a simple and sweet song about missing someone; and it’s quite catchy. In the documentary about the making of the song, Paul mentioned that John would have wanted them to use the new technology to finish the song because The Beatles were always experimenting. AI is built on historical data, so naturally, it would make sense for it to be used to capitalize on nostalgia. But nostalgia only works if you already know it was really good. Anyway, if you have any questions, want more explanations, or strongly disagree, comment below, follow me on Twitter (X), follow me on Threads, follow me on TikTok, or shoot me an email.
Disclaimer: These views are my own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of any organization with which I am affiliated with.