It’s been 29 years since Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia passed away, but Dead-heads can now hear the voice of their fallen idol again. Thanks to a new partnership between Garcia’s estate and ElevenLabs, an AI audio research and deployment company, fans can make a Jerry Garcia vocal model read all sorts of written content.
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Audiobooks, articles, poetry, and more can be heard not just in Garcia’s smoky elocution, but in 32 different languages via the ElevenReader app.
According to a statement from ElevenLabs, the company worked “in close collaboration with the Jerry Garcia Estate to ensure that the reproduction of Garcia’s voice was as authentic and true to his legacy as possible.” This new AI model of Garcia’s voice is also going to be used as part of upcoming projects by the Jerry Garcia Foundation.
“My father was a pioneering artist, who embraced innovative audio and visual technologies,” Jerry’s daughter, Keelin Garcia, tells Billboard. She is also vice president of the foundation.
“In the 1990s, my dad introduced me to the computer, digital art, and video games. When we travelled on concert tour, we played on [a Nintendo] Game Boy. At home, we’d have fun playing on the Macintosh in the studio where my father created his first digital art, and housed his MIDI guitar. Now, as technological landscapes continue to expand, ElevenLabs AI Audio technology will offer fans the first opportunity to hear and stream a replica of my father’s voice reading their favourite books and other written content.”
Garcia is not the first celebrity voice that ElevenLabs has recreated with the help of AI. Some of the notable examples include Judy Garland, James Dean, Burt Reynolds, and Sir Laurence Olivier, all of whom are part of the ‘Iconic Voice Collection.’
“By bringing voices like Jerry Garcia to our platform, we’re not just enhancing our app – we’re creating new ways for people to experience content. This project has been a labour of love, and we couldn’t be happier with how Jerry’s voice has been recreated. It’s a beautiful thing to bring his sound to life again for both longtime fans and a new generation of listeners,” said Dustin Blank, head of partnerships at ElevenLabs.
AI vocal models have surged in popularity in the past few years, with controversial results. The most widely known example is the fan-made song, Heart On My Sleeve with vocal models of The Weeknd and Drake. More recently, AI vocal platform Kits.AI came under fire for showing producers how to train a vocal model on Splice samples without authorisation.
Check out the Jerry Garcia model at elevenlabs.io.
