“Now and Then: How AI Is Changing Music, the World, and Even Lennon’s Voice”

“Now and Then: How AI Is Changing Music, the World, and Even Lennon’s Voice”

In 2023, algorithms helped extract John Lennon’s voice from a noisy 1970s cassette recording, making it possible to release what became known as the “final” song by The Beatles.

Technology has learned to handle audio with remarkable precision.
But when we listen to tracks fully generated by neural networks, our brains instantly detect something off. The sound often feels “plastic” and lifeless.

Why does this happen?

Music isn’t magic — it’s a structured engineering system that our brains decode in milliseconds.
And it’s precisely at this engineering level that artificial intelligence continues to fall short, again and again.