Country Music legend Randy Travis releases a new song

[thewayne]

So what?, many of you say.

He had a near fatal stroke eleven years ago and almost completely lost the ability to speak and sing! In that time, he's done some acoustic playing and was inducted into the CW Hall of Fame. He's not an invalid, no idea how much the stroke affected him otherwise.

Details have not been fully released, but through using AI technology, they've recreated his voice and he has a new song out.

Now obviously this brings up a host of issues. I am absolutely okay with this: Randy seems to be fully competent of mind and body, just not able to speak or sing. He has control of his music, and participated in this project to recreate his voice and get this song out. I think this is quite awesome! Not that I'm a CW fan or really care one way or another, but it's great for an artist to be able to express themselves creatively after nearly dying from a stroke and being deprived of their greatest instrument.

But you can see where this can be abused. As much as I'd love to hear new Freddie Mercury, or David Bowie, they're long gone and cannot participate in the process. No input from them. Theoretically their estate or IP managers could, and I would think that's wrong. I have the same problem with cinema recreations of James Dean or Humphrey Bogart. Digital de-aging of people, such as the ABBA Voyager holographic performance? Very interesting. And all four of them are alive to consent to it. Digital recreations of a performing Tupac? Very problematic for me.

One thing that we don't know about the Randy Travis thing which may come out eventually is who performed the vocals for the recording, which is being supposed that Randy's generated voice was then layed over.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/randy-travis-releases-ai-song-1235014871/

Comments

[kaishin108]

That could get out of hand in very weird ways. New Elvis songs? He is alive? It really could spiral...

I am not a huge CW fan but I do like Randy Travis, but still.

[disneydream06]

It's cool that it can be done, but this I think is an example of why I don't like AI.
Like you said, I can easily see this being abused for the long dead. :(
Hugs, Jon

[silveradept]

There's a big enough corpus of singing for Travis to have his voice digitally regenerated, I guess, kind of like Ebert's was. At the same time, the way it's described in the article makes it sound a lot more like auto-tune on top of someone else's work, and that could become an issue. It also makes me wonder what this voice clone is like, if it needs someone else's performance to serve as the base layer.