Why did Paul McCartney use AI to help recreate the voice of John Lennon from an old cassette recording?
Last Updated: 22.06.2025 00:14
McCartney was then able to re-record the piano part, add other instrumental and vocal parts with the help of the other Beatles, and then end up with a studio quality recording using Lennon’s original vocal with some additional writing. So Lennon’s vocal was not created with AI; it was simply extracted from the original tape recording with modern technology.
Are you thinking of “Now and Then,” which was released in 2023? For that song, AI was used to isolate Lennon’s vocal so that the somewhat out of tune piano and other background sounds could be removed, leaving the vocal all by itself. This, of course, was an at-home recording on cassette, so the sound quality was poor. Once Lennon’s vocal was extracted, they were able to place it in a studio setting digitally and treat it like a vocal normally would be treated so that the sound quality became that of a studio rather than that of a living room with a terrible recording setup.