The Turning

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By Mark SavageBBC Music Correspondent

Sir Paul Mccartney says he has employed Artificial Intelligence to help create what he calls " The Final Beatles record".

He the technology had been used to " extricate" John Lennon 's voice from an old demo so he could complete The Song .

" We just finished it up and it'll be released this year, " he explained.

Sir Paul did not name The Song , but it is likely to be a 1978 Lennon composition called Now And Then .

It had already been considered as a possible " reunion song" for The Beatles in 1995, as they were compiling their career-spanning Anthology series.

Sir Paul had received the demo a year earlier from Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono . It was One of several Songs on a cassette labelled " For Paul" that Lennon had made shortly before his death in 1980.

Lo-fi and embryonic, the tracks were largely recorded onto a boombox as the musician sat at a piano in his New York apartment.

Cleaned up by producer Jeff Lynne , two of those Songs - Free As A Bird and Real Love - were completed and released in 1995 and '96, marking The Beatles ' first " new" material in 25 years.

The Band also attempted to record Now And Then , an apologetic Love Song that was fairly typical of his later career, but The Session was quickly abandoned.

" It was One Day - One afternoon, really - messing with it, " Lynne recalled.

" The Song had a chorus but is almost totally lacking in verses. We did the backing track, a rough go that we really didn't finish. "

Sir Paul later claimed that George Harrison had declared The Song " rubbish" and refused to work on it.

" It didn't have a very good title, it needed a bit of reworking, but it had a beautiful verse and it had John singing it, " he told Q Magazine.

" [But] George didn't like it. The Beatles being a democracy, we didn't do it. "

There were also said to have been technical issues with the original recording, which featured a persistent " buzz" from the electricity circuits in Lennon's apartment.

In 2009, a new version of the demo, without the background noise, was released on a bootleg CD. Fans have speculated this recording may not have been available in 1995, suggesting it was stolen from his apartment, along with other Personal Effects , after his death.

In the intervening years, Sir Paul has repeatedly talked about his desire to finish The Song .

" That One 's still lingering around, " he told a Bbc Four documentary on Jeff Lynne in 2012. " So I'm going to nick in with Jeff and do it. Finish it, One of These Days . "

'Ropey cassette'

It would seem that technology has now afforded the musician a chance to achieve that goal.

The Turning Point came with Peter Jackson 's Get Back documentary, where Dialogue Editor Emile de la Rey trained computers to recognise The Beatles ' voices and separate them from background noises, and even their own instruments, to create " clean" audio.

The same process allowed McCartney to " duet" with Lennon on his recent tour, and for new surround sound mixes of Beatles' Revolver album to be created Last Year .

And now, there's new music from the Fab Four .

" He [Jackson] was able to extricate John's voice from a ropey little bit of cassette, " McCartney told Radio 4 's Martha Kearney .

" We had John's voice and a piano and he could separate them with AI. They tell the machine. 'That's The Voice . This is a guitar. Lose The Guitar '.

" So when we came to to make what will be The Last Beatles' record, it was a demo that John had [and] we were able to take John's voice and get it pure through this AI.

" Then we can mix the record, as you would normally do. So it gives you some sort of leeway. "

However, the musician admitted that other applications of AI gave him cause for concern.

" I'm not on the on The Internet that much [but] people will say to me, 'Oh, yeah, there's a track where John's singing One of My Songs ', and it's just AI, you know?

" It's kind of scary but exciting, because it's The Future . We'll just have to see where that leads. "

The Star was talking to BBC Radio 4 ahead of The Launch of a photography exhibition at The National Portrait Gallery.

Titled Eye Of The Storm , it features portraits taken by McCartney on his own camera, between December 1963 and February 1964, as The Beatles were catapulted to global fame.

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Source of news: bbc.com