By Sylvia Hui
LONDON (AP) --Artificial intelligence has been used to extract John Lennon's voice from an old demo to create "the last Beatles record," decades after the band broke up, Paul McCartney said Tuesday.
McCartney, 80, told the BBC that the technology was used to separate the Beatles' voices from background sounds during the making of director Peter Jackson's 2021 documentary series, "The Beatles: Get Back." The "new" song is set to be released later this year, he said.
Jackson was "able to extricate John's voice from a ropey little bit of cassette and a piano," McCartney told BBC radio. "He could separate them with AI, he'd tell the machine 'That's a voice, this is a guitar, lose the guitar'."
"So when we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John had that we worked on," he added. "We were able to take John's voice and get it pure through this AI so then we could mix the record as you would do. It gives you some sort of leeway."
McCartney didn't identify the name of the demo, but the BBC and others said it was likely to be an unfinished 1978 love song by Lennon called "Now and Then." The demo was included on a cassette labeled "For Paul" that McCartney had received from Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, the BBC reported.
McCartney described AI technology as "kind of scary but exciting," adding: "We will just have to see where that leads."
The same technology enabled McCartney to "duet" virtually with Lennon, who was murdered in 1980, on "I've Got a Feeling" last year at Glastonbury Festival.
The singer-songwriter is set to open an exhibition later this month at the National Portrait Gallery in London featuring previously unseen photographs that he took during the early days of the Beatles at the start of "Beatlemania," when the band rose to worldwide fame.
The exhibition, titled "Eyes of the Storm," showcases more than 250 photos McCartney took on his camera between 1963 and 1964 — including portraits of Ringo Starr, George Harrison and Lennon, as well as Beatles manager Brian Epstein.
Jennifer Kent On Why Her Feature Directing Debut, “The Babadook,” Continues To Haunt Us
"The Babadook," when it was released 10 years ago, didn't seem to portend a cultural sensation.
It was the first film by a little-known Australian filmmaker, Jennifer Kent. It had that strange name. On opening weekend, it played in two theaters.
But with time, the long shadows of "The Babadook" continued to envelop moviegoers. Its rerelease this weekend in theaters, a decade later, is less of a reminder of a sleeper 2014 indie hit than it is a chance to revisit a horror milestone that continues to cast a dark spell.
Not many small-budget, first-feature films can be fairly said to have shifted cinema but Kent's directorial debut may be one of them. It was at the nexus of that much-debated term "elevated horror." But regardless of that label, it helped kicked off a wave of challenging, filmmaker-driven genre movies like "It Follows," "Get Out" and "Hereditary."
Kent, 55, has watched all of this — and those many "Babadook" memes — unfold over the years with a mix of elation and confusion. Her film was inspired in part by the death of her father, and its horror elements likewise arise out of the suppression of emotions. A single mother (Essie Davis) is struggling with raising her young son (Noah Wiseman) years after the tragic death of her husband. A figure from a pop-up children's book begins to appear. As things grow more intense, his name is drawn out in three chilling syllables — "Bah-Bah-Doooook" — an incantation of unprocessed grief.
Kent recently spoke from her native Australia to reflect on the origins and continuing life of "The Babadook."
Q: Given that you didn't set out to in any way "change" horror, how have you regarded the unique afterlife of "The... Read More