The Beatles have been nominated for 2 Grammy awards this yr, and no, we didn’t unintentionally fall right into a time warp again to the Sixties. The Beatles’ music “Now and Then,” refined with the usage of AI and launched final yr, is up for File of the 12 months and Greatest Rock Efficiency. So, the fab 4 shall be up in opposition to artists like Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, and Beyoncé, setting the tone for a fairly bizarre Grammys second.
Although the band has been damaged up for 50 years, Paul McCartney determined to make use of AI final yr to create “the last Beatles record.” McCartney isn’t utilizing this expertise to resurrect his late bandmates, John Lennon and George Harrison, with deepfakes. As a substitute, McCartney took one in every of Lennon’s demos from 1978 and used AI to scrub up the recording’s poor sound high quality.
McCartney took inspiration from the filmmaker Peter Jackson’s “The Beatles: Get Back,” the 2021 documentary collection based mostly on archival footage of recording classes for “Let It Be.” These recordings from 1969 didn’t sound excellent, however the movie’s dialogue editor Emile de la Rey used AI to acknowledge every of the Beatles’ voices and isolate them from background noise. This identical expertise helped producer Giles Martin make a brand new stereo combine for the Beatles’ 1966 album “Revolver.”
This AI-based audio modifying is just like how video chat platforms like FaceTime, Google Meet, or Zoom would possibly filter out background noise from a name. Machine studying fashions could be skilled on one thing particular — whether or not that’s a human voice on a video name, or a particular sort of guitar in a studio — and be taught to isolate these sounds from the remainder of a recording.
Can fellow nominees like Billie Eilish and Kendrick Lamar stand an opportunity in opposition to the Beatles on the Grammys? Possibly the true query is that if the Beatles can win solely based mostly on novelty — of all songs nominated for File of the 12 months, “Now and Then” has the fewest Spotify streams at 78 million. If the Beatles are “more popular than Jesus,” then so is Charli XCX now, too.
