If you’ve been watching list nominees for this year’s «Grammy» music awards, you were probably also surprised to see The Beatles — perhaps one of the world’s most famous bands, which, however, broke up 50 years ago.
Yes, artificial intelligence had a hand in this» but it did not generate a new song, it only slightly «improved» an old demo recording of John Lennon. Initially, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Ringo Starr tried to restore it on their own, reuniting to work on new songs in the early 90s — «Free as a Bird» and «Real Love» were successfully completed, but work on «Now and Then» was not (at that time, there was no technology to separate the piano sounds from Lennon’s voice).
The turning point came at the beginning of this decade, when director Peter Jackson was working on his documentary «Get Back» for Disney Plus. His team developed a technology that made it possible to take almost any piece of music (even an old demo) and «divide it into different components using machine learning».
McCartney and Starr realized that this was their opportunity to bring «Now and Then» to the final. Paul recorded the bass music, Ringo added the drums, and producer Giles Martin came up with the string arrangement, «as his father would have done in the old days» (Giles — son of The Beatles producer George Martin, sometimes called the «fifth Beatle»).
After all, last year’s song «Now and Then» debuted on streaming services (the YouTube video alone has garnered over 60 million views), and in 2024, it was nominated for a «Grammy». Now, we are waiting for the award ceremony in February, which will show whether the song created with the help of AI will receive the coveted statuette.
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