The world runs on stories. One such story that moved me in a big way in the recent past consists of elements that are of significant importance to my life – my favourite music and band – The Beatles, friendship, and a part of my professional life that activates the nerd in me as it relates to understanding practical applications of AI/ML.
Sometime
late last year the Beatles announced that they were going to release a single –
what was billed as their last song ‘with the help of AI’. My alarm bells started
ringing. For one – The Beatles as a band broke up in 1970 and out of 4, 2
members – John Lennon and George Harrison passed away in 1980 and 2001 respectively.
One of the reasons that the Beatles are relevant to so many people till this
day is that they were for their time, really way ahead and experimental with
their music and going with that theme, this announcement implied (to their fans
atleast) possibly the use of Gen AI to recreate John and George’s vocals. But to
be honest, the thought of this was horrifying and I really wondered why the hell
Paul McCartney, who seemed to be aggressively driving this- aged 81, had achieved the most ultimate of
fame and who had just become United Kingdom’s first billionaire musician would
want to do this and possibly risk belittling the formidable legacy of the
Beatles.
Clearly,
I was the not the only one who thought this way as there was an immediate backlash
to the point that Paul himself had to issue a clarification that AI was not going
to be used to generate any new content and was just going to be used to clean
up some old music.
So
what was it exactly that AI/ML did here? There was an old demo tape where John
Lennon had recorded his voice in unfinished songs in the 1970’s. His wife
passed the tape on to the surviving members of the Beatles in the 1990’s. Two
unreleased songs from the tape – Free as a Bird and Real Love were completed by
the remaining band members in the 1995 by layering instruments and vocals on
top. The third song – Now and Then – could not be completed. This is because John’s
vocals on it, were often faded at certain points, to much of background noise
due to the overbearing piano and external noise. However in 2022, a machine
learning technique was used to isolate all the different instruments and voices
in a song, each into a separate track. This is based on a mathematical
technique Short-Time Fourier Transform (STFT) that is used to analyze the
frequency content of a signal over time. The Fourier Transform decomposes a
signal into its constituent frequencies, providing a frequency spectrum. It’s quite
complicated like separating out the original colours from a paint mix. In a
nutshell, this technology was able to separate out John’s vocals from the piano
and all other background noise in the tape. Hence the last official song of the
Beatles ‘Now and Then’ – in which all 4 members of the band – John, Paul,
George, Ringo have participated in was finally released in Nov 2nd
2023. The before and after effect of this ML and how the song finally came to life
is really well documented by a 12 min video by the impeccable narration
of surviving members of the Beatles – Paul and Ringo available on Youtube.
So
coming back to the original question of why Paul McCartney was so determined to
release this particular single despite all this time and so many setbacks. At
the heart of every impactful story there is an emotional core and here it is a complicated
but really deep friendship. By the time, the Beatles had broken up in 1970, the
once really close friendship between John and Paul had soured to the point that
they were not on talking terms because of bitterness, jealousy and resentment.
However
the verses of this song written by John features a wistful, mournful lyric that
reads—with no stretch of the imagination—as a message from one old friend to
another:.
“I know it's true
It's all because of you
And if I make it through
It's all because of you.”
John goes on to sing:
“Now
and then
I
miss you.
I
want you to be there for me
Always to return to me”
And most hauntingly, according to a Forbes article, the final words that John spoke to Paul in person 4 years before he died was “Think about me every now and then, old friend,” which ultimately became the title of the last ever song of the Beatles.
It feels poignant to write about this story on Friendship
Day which ultimately resulted in possibly the coolest application of AI/ML I ever
thought possible - To allow a millennial
fan (whose parents were literal infants at the height of popularity of the band)
of the Beatles to witness a live release
of their last song in 2023 - more than 53 years after their breakup.
