AP (“With help from AI, Randy Travis got his voice back. Here’s how his first song post-stroke came to be“):
With some help from artificial intelligence, country music star Randy Travis, celebrated for his timeless hits like “Forever and Ever, Amen” and “I Told You So,” has his voice back.
In July 2013, Travis was hospitalized with viral cardiomyopathy, a virus that attacks the heart, and later suffered a stroke. The Country Music Hall of Famer had to relearn how to walk, spell and read in the years that followed. A condition called aphasia limits his ability to speak — it’s why his wife Mary Travis assists him in interviews. It’s also why he hasn’t released new music in over a decade, until now.
“Where That Came From,” which released Friday, is a rich acoustic ballad amplified by Travis’ immediately recognizable, soulful vocal tone.
Cris Lacy, Warner Music Nashville co-president, approached Randy and Mary Travis and asked: “‘What if we could take Randy’s voice and recreate it using AI?,’” Mary Travis told The Associated Press over Zoom last week, Randy smiling in agreement right next to her. “Well, we were all over that, so we were so excited.”
“All I ever wanted since the day of a stroke was to hear that voice again.”
Lacy tapped developers in London to create a proprietary AI model to begin the process. The result was two models: One with 12 vocal stems (or song samples), and another with 42 stems collected across Travis’ career — from 1985 to 2013, says Kyle Lehning, Travis’ longtime producer. Lacy and Lehning chose to use “Where That Came From,” a song written by Scotty Emerick and John Scott Sherrill that Lehning co-produced and held on to for years. He believed it could best articulate the humanity of Travis’ idiosyncratic vocal style.
“I never even thought about another song,” Lehning said.
Once he input the demo vocal (sung by James Dupree) into the AI models, “it took about five minutes to analyze,” says Lehning. “I really wish somebody had been here with a camera because I was the first person to hear it. And it was stunning, to me, how good it was sort of right off the bat. It’s hard to put an equation around it, but it was probably 70, 75% what you hear now.”
“There were certain aspects of it that were not authentic to Randy’s performance,” he said, so he began to edit and build on the recording with engineer Casey Wood, who also worked closely with Travis over a few decades.
The pair cherrypicked from the two models, and made alterations to things like vibrato speed, or slowing and relaxing phrases. “Randy is a laid-back singer,” Lehning says. “Randy, in my opinion, had an old soul quality to his voice. That’s one of the things that made him unique, but also, somehow familiar.”
His vocal performance on “Where That Came From” had to reflect that fact.
“We were able to just improve on it,” Lehning says of the AI recording. “It was emotional, and it’s still emotional.”
Mary Travis says the “human element,” and “the people that are involved” in this project, separate it from more nefarious uses of AI in music.
“Randy, I remember watching him when he first heard the song after it was completed. It was beautiful because at first, he was surprised, and then he was very pensive, and he was listening and studying,” she said. “And then he put his head down and his eyes were a little watery. I think he went through every emotion there was, in those three minutes of just hearing his voice again.”
Here’s the official video:
And another (better, in my judgment) version showing Travis reacting to his “own” voice:
My assessment of the result is pretty much the same as The Verge‘s Wes Davis (“Randy Travis gets his voice back in a new Warner AI music experiment“) adds:
The result of Warner’s experiment is a gentle tune that captures Travis’ relaxed style, which rarely wavered far from its baritone foundation. It sounds like one of those singles that would’ve hung around the charts long enough for me to nervously sway to once after working up the gumption to ask a girl to dance at a middle school social. I wouldn’t say it’s a great Randy Travis song, but it’s certainly not the worst — I’d even say I like it.
It’s on par with, say, the recent new Rolling Stones singles: immediately identifiable, a perfectly worthy addition to their catalog, and yet not as good as their work in their prime.
As to the implications, I’m on a similar page there as well:
Dustin Ballard, who runs the various incarnations of the There I Ruined It social media account, creates his AI voice parodies in much the same way as Travis’ team, giving birth to goofy mash-ups like AI Elvis Presley singing “Baby Got Back” or synthetic Johnny Cash singing “Barbie Girl.”
It would be easy to sound the alarm over this song or Ballard’s creations, declaring the death of human-made music as we know it. But I’d say it does quite the opposite, reinforcing what tools like an AI voice clone can do in the right hands. Whether you like the song or not, you have to admit that you can’t get something like this from casual prompting.
Cris Lacy, Co-president of Warner Music Nashville, told CBS Sunday Morning that AI voice cloning sites produce approximations of artists like Travis that don’t “sound real, because it’s not.” She called the label’s use of AI to clone Travis’ voice “AI for good.”
Right now, Warner can’t really do much about AI clones that it feels don’t fall under the heading of “AI for good.” But Tennessee’s recently-passed ELVIS Act, which goes into effect on July 1st, would allow labels to take legal action against those using software to recreate an artists’ voice without permission.
Travis’ song is a good edge-case example of AI being used to make music that actually feels legitimate. But on the other hand, it also may open a new path for Warner, which owns the rights to vast catalogs of music from famous, dead artists that are ripe for digital resurrection and, if they want to go there, potential profit. As heartwarming as this story is, it makes me wonder what lessons Warner Music Nashville — and the record industry as a whole — will take away from this song.
I’m more leery than optimistic about how this technology will be used in the future. I’m actually fine with the mashup trend but really don’t want new “Elvis” or “John Lennon” songs that are put out by record companies.
But, yes, this is a case of “AI for good” because Travis himself had final say over the project. While it doesn’t, despite the universal headlines to the contrary, actually give him his singing voice back, it’s the next best thing. So long as he’s happy with the result and fans are clear as to what they’re getting, there’s no down side to a new Randy Travis release that brings a smile to his face.
