The Beatles have been nominated for two Grammy awards this year, and no, we did not accidentally fall into a time warp back to the 1960s. The Beatles’ song “Now and Then,” refined with the use of AI and released last year, is up for Record of the Year and Best Rock Performance. So, the fab four will be up against artists like Sabrina Carpenter, Chappell Roan, and Beyoncé, setting the tone for a pretty weird Grammys moment.
Though the band has been broken up for 50 years, Paul McCartney decided to use AI last year to create “the last Beatles record.” McCartney isn’t using this technology to resurrect his late bandmates, John Lennon and George Harrison, with deepfakes. Instead, McCartney took one of Lennon’s demos from 1978 and used AI to clean up the recording’s poor sound quality.
McCartney took inspiration from the filmmaker Peter Jackson’s “The Beatles: Get Back,” the 2021 documentary series based on archival footage of recording sessions for “Let It Be.” These recordings from 1969 didn’t sound very good, but the film’s dialogue editor Emile de la Rey used AI to recognize each of the Beatles’ voices and isolate them from background noise. This same technology helped producer Giles Martin make a new stereo mix for the Beatles’ 1966 album “Revolver.”
This AI-based audio editing is similar to how video chat platforms like FaceTime, Google Meet, or Zoom might filter out background noise from a call. Machine learning models can be trained on something specific — whether that’s a human voice on a video call, or a specific kind of guitar in a studio — and learn to isolate those sounds from the rest of a recording.
Can fellow nominees like Billie Eilish and Kendrick Lamar stand a chance against the Beatles at the Grammys? Maybe the real question is if the Beatles can win solely based on novelty — of all songs nominated for Record of the Year, “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.
