Pete Townshend “interested” in AI to complete unreleased pieces

Pete Townshend was recently a guest on the “Late Show With Stephen Colbert“, and shared his own interest in using artificial intelligence to complement some of the unreleased songs he’s written over the years.

The Who guitarist participated in Stephen Colbert’s TV show for an episode aired last November 12th and among many questions, he was asked if it was true that he has “never heard music in the archive, ready to be pulled out”. Answering the question, the associate of Roger Daltrey he said:

“Yes, I have about three hundred and fifty, four hundred and fifty pieces of music. Now, a lot of it is probably terrible. I managed to sift through about half of it.”

During the chat, Townshend then talked about the possibility that fans will sooner or later hear this previously unreleased material and, referring to the Suno generative artificial intelligence platformwhich creates songs from user-provided text prompts, said:

“I don’t know what to do with it. I’m also kind of interested in AI. I’m interested in taking some of my old songs that didn’t quite work because I didn’t get them right the first time, and putting them on Suno or something like that, an AI music machine, and seeing what it comes out of. There might be some hits out of it.”

Pete Townshend had already spoken about his interest in artificial intelligence last March in an interview with the “Times” and declared: “If I said to AI, ‘Write a bunch of songs like Pete Townshend did in 1973’, a lot of Who fans would be really happy.”