AI Won The Beatles a Grammy 55 Years After They Broke Up 53
The Beatles' final song "Now and Then," featuring John Lennon's AI-restored vocals from a 1970s demo, has won the Grammy for Best Rock Performance. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr completed the track in 2023 using machine learning to isolate Lennon's voice from the original piano recording.
Not AI. Computer-assisted noise reduction. (Score:4, Insightful)
This was computer-assisted noise reduction.
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What would you call machine learning?
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But it was kind of interesting that at the 2025 Grammy's....both The Beatles and The Rolling Stones won!!!
I think Stones were for best Rock Album?
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Yup, the Stones won. Side note - the person accepting the award for them (the Stones weren't there) gave a shout-out to Pearl Jam, who was apparently also nominated.
What this all tells us is... old people are running the show and making all the decisions. Maybe AI Kurt Cobain can win "Best New Artist" sometime in the future.
Final commericalization of the 60s/70s (Score:2)
Not worried, this is the final commercialization of the 1960s / 1970s musical acts.
The Grammys self-promote the music industry to
- Sell product
- Name drop enough (very late career) big name acts to bring in a large number of possible music buying customers.
- Have enough nominations to have at least one artist that 80% of the people know
- Acknowledge artists with large fan bases on current or recent tours, usually selling music/product to 12-30 year old girls/women
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"AI" is machine learning, fine. But not all machine learning is "AI" esp not the marketing hype "AI". I would not call OCR an AI.
80s called, wants their pointless argument back (Score:2)
"AI" is machine learning, fine. But not all machine learning is "AI" esp not the marketing hype "AI". I would not call OCR an AI.
In the 1980s we had the same question,
even though mostly we didn't do statistical
models and definitely not neural nets.
The answer turned out to be:
If it uses any "AI" tech (mostly rule-based
OPS-5 type systems, but anything involving
search heuristics like hill climbing, A*, etc.)
then it is "AI". Until the day when the application
becomes well-known, then it suddenly isn't "AI".
A shorter converse version: "if we know how to do it,
it's not AI". Even if it was "AI" yesterday and even if
the same technique is bein
Re:Not AI. Computer-assisted noise reduction. (Score:5, Informative)
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I would say it does meet the current working definition of AI because it is model-based - it couldn't be done this well without training a model of John Lennon's singing voice, much like a human impersonator. And second, 'noise reduction' implies the process is only removing noise, which is not the case. It is adding sounds that were simply not present in the base recording, because they were never captured with acceptable fidelity in the first place.
This. I think the treatment of Lennon's voice could be a much more sophisticated, but analogous process that re-created Glenn Gould's 1955 recording of The Goldberg Variations. [npr.org]
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This. I think the treatment of Lennon's voice could be a much more sophisticated, but analogous process that re-created Glenn Gould's 1955 recording of The Goldberg Variations. [npr.org]
Sorry, I botched the wording. I meant to say that the treatment of Lennon's voice was more sophisticated, because it required building a model of Lennon's voice. AFAIK the Zenph process for Gould's performance captured precise MIDI information from the old recording, and re-performed the pieces on a Yamaha Disklavier.
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Did they train it on Lennon's voice? There are AI models that can separate vocals and music that are generic and work with most songs. Been around for years, I use them to make karaoke versions. They can even separate lead and backing vocals.
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The original recording was of very poor quality. It was done with a cheap cassette recorder and highly distorted.
Re:Not AI. Computer-assisted noise reduction. (Score:5, Interesting)
It was a bit more than that. That original cassette recording was very bad, so bad that in the mid-1990s the technology of the time couldn't clean it up sufficiently. So there's as much reconstruction as noise reduction.
That being said, there's a reason George Harrison vetoed continuing work on it, and that's not because of the technological limitations of the time, but because, frankly, the song kind of sucks. Not one of John's better efforts, or at least far from completed.
Re:Not AI. Computer-assisted noise reduction. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Sir Paul is really holding the Beatles back. He had half a century to take the band in a new direction and we get this dull 'now and then' lullaby?
Get Ringo back in the studio for a remix. Surely he can take George's guitar with John's vocals to create something more bleeding edge? This is the band that weren't afraid to experiment with Helter Skelter/Rain/Revolution 9.
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This was computer-assisted noise reduction.
This was a an specifically trained model (training neural networks is basically a definition of AI) for noise reduction. AI is a method - this is a textbook example of it in use. If you're going to complain about calling something AI this is literally the worst example for your cause.
AI can get awards now? (Score:2, Flamebait)
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That AI allows us to build things we can't do it before?
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Let's look again at the headline:
AI Won The Beatles a Grammy 55 Years After They Broke Up
Superficially, it may appear to say AI won a grammy. But it doesn't. It says AI won The Beatles a grammy.
You could say "Clever play won the Kansas City Chiefs the Super Bowl." Does that mean the play won the Super Bowl, or the team that ran it?
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Let's look again at the headline:
AI Won The Beatles a Grammy 55 Years After They Broke Up
Superficially, it may appear to say AI won a grammy. But it doesn't. It says AI won The Beatles a grammy.
You could say "Clever play won the Kansas City Chiefs the Super Bowl." Does that mean the play won the Super Bowl, or the team that ran it?
Clever Hans won the Animal Intelligence test.
Musically speaking, I let my heart fall into clever hands.
Clever hands, broke my heart in two!
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AI didn't get the award any more than a Dolby NR filter got the award, or a spring delay unit got an award. It's just a stupid headline.
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Re: AI can get awards now? (Score:2)
If Beyonce can get one then why not AI? AI seems to be more talented.
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Not AI, the undead (Score:5, Informative)
Couldn't they let John Lennon and George Harrison rest in peace?
Things have to come to an end, and as great as they were, the Beatles are no more. This is a necromancy award, not a Grammy.
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They tried it back in the 90s but the technology wasn’t available then. The guitar tracks in the song were recorded by Harrison during the first attempt.
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I dunno...they still tour and pack stadiums with $$$ tickets....
Maybe that says more about the dearth of good modern music than it does about the relevancy of the Stones.
And if nothing else...if Keith Richards can still process oxygen after all he's been through in life...that gives ALL of us hope!!
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What makes you think he's still depending on an oxygen-dependent metabolic process when all the evidence points to the contrary?
Re:Not AI, the undead (Score:4, Funny)
At some point Keith is going to start wanting to eat brains and that's how it will start.
Re: Not AI, the undead (Score:2)
I don't believe it is a lack of good new music, but more of what drives the unending sequel machine. People like the familiar. That, and a lot of people in the industry are older and this is nostalgia for them.
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It's not that there aren't great artists making great music, it's just that it's gotten increasingly difficult to be heard above the noise. Instead of record labels finding 200 bands to back and promote for $1 million a piece, they look for 2 pop starts to each pour $100 million into. The economics of the music industry in the streaming age are such that you can't make money off music unless you are packing stadiums. There are a lot of great musicians that labor in obscurity because they never get promoted
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Rock and Roll is really dead if the best rock performance is perfomed beyond the grave.
Why peak rock is dead (Score:2)
Peak rock is dead. The newer crowd relies too much on editing machines such that few if any will recapture the organic sound of earlier rock. The earlier artists were forced to play and sing organically most the time because they didn't have a choice.
While a "bar band" may still play live, once in the studio they'll accept that editing machines will clean up the rough spots. In the old days one had to keep playing in the studio until they got it right instead of dump the problem onto the editor, forcing the
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Couldn't they let John Lennon and George Harrison rest in peace?
I don't think either of them care or are impacted in any way. They played with their voice, it's not like they exhumed their corpses for the music video.
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Couldn't they let John Lennon and George Harrison rest in peace?
Things have to come to an end, and as great as they were, the Beatles are no more. This is a necromancy award, not a Grammy.
Get used to it. We're going to see more and more of this. It's inevitable.
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It's a good song, I'm glad we get to hear it. They left their unfinished art as a gift to humanity, and humanity is better for it.
(begin rant)
To put myself in their shoes, if I croaked tomorrow, I would hope my rants about how DOM/CSS is ill-suited for the CRUD GUI's that customers really want will inspire a new state-ful GUI-over-https XML standard. Too bad I wouldn't be around to enjoy it. I won't rest in peace if the ill-fitting UI standard
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Couldn't they let John Lennon and George Harrison rest in peace? Things have to come to an end, and as great as they were, the Beatles are no more. This is a necromancy award, not a Grammy.
Grammy Grammy
We love Necromancy
This hack brings back Dear John
Even after he's gone
With one last goodbye
Mediocre song and a sigh
Beatles came and have been
Oldies we love now and then
Just please don't pay Grannie
In necro-cryptcurrency
Weird win. (Score:2)
Lifelong Beatles fan here, But... really? It's an okay song, but does it actually merit this award? If it didn't have the B word attached to it, and they had noise-reduced this thing by the Wingnuts from 1967, it would have dropped into the darkness in short order. "The Beatles" is doing the heavy lifting. I don't think it was deserved.
Don't get me wrong... lifting the vocals so nicely is an amazing technical achievement. I would support an engineering win, or a special merit. But rock performance?
Contradictory... (Score:3)
It seems to me that needing to wait 50 years for technology to make a 'rock performance' enjoyable/worthy of release excludes the possibility of meriting an award for said 'performance.'
Psyop (Score:1)
The Beatles were a psyop of mediocrity and decadence. There's very little of redeeming musical quality there, except that it gets stuck in your head and you can't get it out.
OF COURSE they're going to to try to squeeze every little bit out of them.
Re: Psyop (Score:2)
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Don't feed the troll. You'll just make him stay in the area. :)
Re: Psyop (Score:2)
video has some creepy moments (Score:2)
There's a lot of footage from the 90's and then some weird face-swapped moments throughout:
https://youtu.be/Opxhh9Oh3rg [youtu.be]