Country music legend gets voice back with AI's help on first new music since stroke

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Country music legend Randy Travis is back with his first new music since suffering a stroke more than a decade ago.

Travis, 65, released "What That Came From From" on Friday. The acoustic ballad features Travis' soulful voice assisted with the help of artificial intelligence, according to the singer's wife Mary Travis.

"'What if we could take Randy's voice and recreate it using AI?,'" Mary told the Associated Press, recounting Warner Music Nashville co-president Cris Lacy's pitch to Randy, who smiled in agreement. "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."

According to the AP, Mary assists the Country Music Hall of Famer in interviews today because a condition called aphasia limits his ability to speak — and sing. In 2013, Randy was hospitalized with viral cardiomyopathy, a virus that attacks the heart, and later suffered a stroke. He had to relearn how to walk, speak and spell.

Developers used vocal stems — isolated samples of his singing — from Randy Travis' career to recreate his singing voice on "Where That Came From," a song written by Scotty Emerick and John Scott Sherrill that Kyle Lehning co-produced and held on to for years. A demo vocal sung by James Dupree was analyzed in five minutes and turned into Travis' voice by two different AI models.

"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," Lehning said. "It's hard to put an equation around it, but it was probably 70, 75% what you hear now."

Lehning said he and recording engineer Casey Wood used edits from the two models and made other modifications, such as changing vibrato speed or slowing down 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."

Travis, known for country hits like "Forever and Ever Amen," "Three Wooden Crosses," "Deeper Than the Holler" and "I Told You So," was moved to tears by the final product.

"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," Mary 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."

FILE - Randy Travis, left, and Mary Davis appear at the 58th annual Academy of Country Music Awards on Thursday, May 11, 2023, in Frisco, Texas. (AP Photo/Jeffrey McWhorter, File)AP

Similar AI technology was used to isolate John Lennon's voice for a new Beatles song last year. Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr released "Now and Then" from a noisy demo of Lennon recorded in the 1970s, and added guitar parts written by George Harrison in 1995 and a string arrangement written with the help of Giles Martin, son of late Beatles producer George Martin.

But some artists have opposed artificial intelligence. More than 200 artists, including Billie Eilish, Stevie Wonder, Nicki Minaj, Peter Frampton, Katy Perry and J Balvin, signed an open letter from the Artists Rights Alliance non-profit calling on tech companies, developers, platforms, and digital music services to stop using AI "to infringe upon and devalue the rights of human artists."

But Mary Travis and Lacy said they hope Randy's new song shows the good that AI can do, and "set a standard" for future use.

"The beauty of this is, you know, we're doing it with a voice that the world knows and has heard and has been comforted by," Mary said. "But I think, just on human terms, it's a very real need. And it's a big loss when you lose the voice of someone that you were connected to, and the ability to have it back is a beautiful gift."

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