Lyndsey Parker on LinkedIn: Tony Kanal Talks 'Transcendent' No Doubt Reunion, New Film Composing…
Lyndsey Parker
I had a hella good conversation with Tony Kanal about No Doubt&#39;s epic Coachella comeback, whether this reunion will continue, whether more Dreamcar music is…
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The Beatles’ “Now and Then”: The AI Myth Busted For Beatles fans and music fans around the world, today is a big deal. Today, the Beatles’ new song, “Now and Then,” gets released. “Now and Then” was an original demo recorded by John Lennon in 1978, before his death. It featured only his voice and piano. The tape was of poor boombox quality, having a buzzing sound throughout the song. Filmmaker Peter Jackson, who directed the Beatles’ 8-hour “Get Back” documentary, worked on restoring the song. Jackson’s film team developed a new technology called MAL, machine audio learning. For Beatle geeks, MAL is also a nod to the Beatles’ original road manager and personal assistant, Mal Evans. MAL can separate voices and instruments to a fine degree, allowing audio engineers to work on each vocal and instrument separately. MAL is a “demixing” process. It is NOT creating a fake voice or instrumentation. It is NOT creating anything new. It is SEPARATING sounds. It’s like taking a cake mix and separating the flour, sugar, eggs, etc. out of the mix and then working with each ingredient by itself. For “Now and Then,” MAL separated John’s voice from his piano so each ingredient could be finely tuned and dealt with in the final mix. Peter Jackson: “But we wanted it to sound a lot better, so we, uh, devised a technology that is called demixing. “It’s an idea that’s been around for a while, but I’ve never really heard it used that well. But we got some really clever people down here at Park Road Post to build some software for us that is all AI-based machine learning. “You teach the computer what a guitar sounds like, you teach them what a human voice sounds like, you teach it what a drum sounds like, you teach it what a bass sounds like. “And so then we can take a mono track of them in Twickenham performing and we can say, ‘Just give us the vocal track’. And the machine learning will render a vocal track only. “So, you’ll see Ringo in the background playing the drums, but you don’t hear the drums. “Not one bit of drum noise – just the vocals clean.” (Source: Guitar . com; Peter Jackson) While Lennon’s voice and piano restoration is remarkably clean, something is missing. Oh, wait a sec . . . it’s musicians recording together in real time. Beatle fans might be thrilled to get one more Beatle song. But it does raise issues about using AI to generate new content from dead artists. What do I think of the new song? I think the Beatles should have let it be in 1970. P.S. The 12-minute documentary on “Now and Then” can be seen here: https://lnkd.in/e-Fgsk8J “Now and Then” https://lnkd.in/eYn4Kgy5

The Beatles’ “Now and Then”: The AI Myth Busted For Beatles fans and music fans around the world, today is a big deal. Today, the Beatles’ new song, “Now and Then,” gets released. “Now and Then” was an original demo recorded by John Lennon in 1978, before his death. It featured only his voice and piano. The tape was of poor boombox quality, having a buzzing sound throughout the song. Filmmaker Peter Jackson, who directed the Beatles’ 8-hour “Get Back” documentary, worked on restoring the song. Jackson’s film team developed a new technology called MAL, machine audio learning. For Beatle geeks, MAL is also a nod to the Beatles’ original road manager and personal assistant, Mal Evans. MAL can separate voices and instruments to a fine degree, allowing audio engineers to work on each vocal and instrument separately. MAL is a “demixing” process. It is NOT creating a fake voice or instrumentation. It is NOT creating anything new. It is SEPARATING sounds. It’s like taking a cake mix and separating the flour, sugar, eggs, etc. out of the mix and then working with each ingredient by itself. For “Now and Then,” MAL separated John’s voice from his piano so each ingredient could be finely tuned and dealt with in the final mix. Peter Jackson: “But we wanted it to sound a lot better, so we, uh, devised a technology that is called demixing. “It’s an idea that’s been around for a while, but I’ve never really heard it used that well. But we got some really clever people down here at Park Road Post to build some software for us that is all AI-based machine learning. “You teach the computer what a guitar sounds like, you teach them what a human voice sounds like, you teach it what a drum sounds like, you teach it what a bass sounds like. “And so then we can take a mono track of them in Twickenham performing and we can say, ‘Just give us the vocal track’. And the machine learning will render a vocal track only. “So, you’ll see Ringo in the background playing the drums, but you don’t hear the drums. “Not one bit of drum noise – just the vocals clean.” (Source: Guitar . com; Peter Jackson) While Lennon’s voice and piano restoration is remarkably clean, something is missing. Oh, wait a sec . . . it’s musicians recording together in real time. Beatle fans might be thrilled to get one more Beatle song. But it does raise issues about using AI to generate new content from dead artists. What do I think of the new song? I think the Beatles should have let it be in 1970. P.S. The 12-minute documentary on “Now and Then” can be seen here: https://lnkd.in/eWY4pSGe “Now and Then” https://lnkd.in/ecfAFnfp