Chuckles of the Day

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The Beatles Are Releasing Their ‘Last’ Record. AI Helped Make It Possible

Sylvia Hui and Maria Sherman wrote . . . . . . . . .

Artificial intelligence has been used to extract John Lennon’s voice from an old demo to create “the last Beatles record,” decades after the band broke up, Paul McCartney said Tuesday.

McCartney, 80, told the BBC that the technology was used to separate the Beatles’ voices from background sounds during the making of director Peter Jackson’s 2021 documentary series, “The Beatles: Get Back.” The “new” song is set to be released later this year, he said.

Jackson was “able to extricate John’s voice from a ropey little bit of cassette and a piano,” McCartney told BBC radio. “He could separate them with AI, he’d tell the machine ‘That’s a voice, this is a guitar, lose the guitar’.”

“So when we came to make what will be the last Beatles record, it was a demo that John had that we worked on,” he added. “We were able to take John’s voice and get it pure through this AI so then we could mix the record as you would do. It gives you some sort of leeway.”

McCartney didn’t identify the name of the demo, but the BBC and others said it was likely to be an unfinished 1978 love song by Lennon called “Now and Then.” The demo was included on a cassette labeled “For Paul” that McCartney had received from Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, the BBC reported.

McCartney described AI technology as “kind of scary but exciting,” adding: “We will just have to see where that leads.”

The same technology enabled McCartney to “duet” virtually with Lennon, who was murdered in 1980, on “I’ve Got a Feeling” last year at Glastonbury Festival.

Holly Herndon, a multidisciplinary artist with a doctorate in composition from Stanford University, used nascent AI machine technology on her last album, 2019′s “Proto,” and developed Holly+, an online protocol that allows the public to upload tracks to be reinterpreted and performed by a deepfake version of her voice. She theorizes that the Beatles’ recording was likely created using a process called “source separation.”

“Source separation has become much easier to do with machine learning. This allows you to extract a voice from a recording, isolating it so that you might accompany it with new instrumentation,” she explains.

That differs from a deepfake vocal. “A deepfake is an entirely new vocal line spawned from a machine learning model trained on old vocal lines,” she said. “While it does not appear to be happening in this example, it is now possible to spawn infinite new media from analyzing older material, which is a similar process, in spirit, to this song.”

McCartney is set to open an exhibition later this month at the National Portrait Gallery in London featuring previously unseen photographs that he took during the early days of the Beatles at the start of “Beatlemania,” when the band rose to worldwide fame.

The exhibition, titled “Eyes of the Storm,” showcases more than 250 photos McCartney took with his camera between 1963 and 1964 — including portraits of Ringo Starr, George Harrison and Lennon, as well as Beatles manager Brian Epstein.

Source : AP

Infographic: The 4 Billion Year Path of Human Evolution

See large image . . . . . .

Source : Visual Capitalist

China New Grads Suffer Anemic Salary Growth in 2022

Starting salaries for new college graduates in 2022 grew at less than half the rate they did the previous year, with almost 60% earning less than 6,000 yuan (US$838) per month, a recent report showed.

Meanwhile, the employment ratio of young graduates by the private sector is declining, with only 28% of the class of 2022 finding jobs in small and medium-sized private enterprises of less than 300 employees, according to the 2023 Employment Blue Book released by MyCOS, an education data and consulting service provider.

Source : Caixin

China Credit Demand Weakens In Fresh Sign of Waning Recovery

China’s credit demand weakened in May as the economy’s recovery lost steam, adding to reasons for the central bank to boost stimulus to spur growth.

Aggregate financing, a broad measure of credit, was 1.6 trillion yuan ($224 billion) in May, the People’s Bank of China said Tuesday, lower than the median estimate of 1.9 trillion yuan in a Bloomberg survey of economists.

Financial institutions offered 1.4 trillion yuan worth of new loans in the month, also missing economists’ forecasts of 1.6 trillion yuan. Both of the figures declined compared with the same month a year ago.

A string of economic reports show China’s economic recovery lost momentum in May: inflation remained close to zero, manufacturing activity contracted, exports shrank for the first time in three months and a rebound in home sales has slowed. Private investment stagnated in the first four months of the year despite a rapid expansion in money supply.

The data came after the the PBOC surprised markets Tuesday morning with a cut to its short-term policy interest rate, a sign that officials are increasingly concerned about faltering growth. Speculation about further monetary easing rose following the move.

The disappointing figures shows that “the PBOC was using the 10-basis point rate cut to comfort the markets ahead of the data,” said Bruce Pang, chief economist and head of research for Greater China at Jones Lang LaSalle Inc. “The demand and dynamism among companies and households is sluggish.”

Growth of M2, the broadest measure of money supply, moderated to 11.6%, the slowest level in almost year. The stock of credit also expanded at a weaker rate than in April at 9.5%.

Net corporate bond issuance turned negative in May, while government bond issuance nearly halved from a year ago, weighing on credit growth. New household mid and long-term loans, a proxy for mortgages, improved from the contraction in April but was still far below the level prior to the property downturn in 2022.

Authorities are also considering a broad package of stimulus measures to boost the economy and the State Council may consider the proposal this week, according to people familiar with the matter.

PBOC Governor Yi Gang last week hinted at more flexibility in monetary policy, referring to “counter-cyclical adjustments” to support the economy, a shift in language that some analysts said signaled more easing. Major state banks have also lowered rates on a range of deposit products, which will help preserve profit margins at banks if lending rates decline.

Source : BNN Bloomberg