It’s a very Imogen Heap way to say hello: “I’ve got to show you this leang – it’s going to alter your life!”
She beams at me, shotriumphg off a enigmatic binformage device. The musician and technologist is an electric, quirky presence even on video call, talking fervently and changing thoughts appreciate a rassociate driver turns corners. She whirls me from her kitchen floor to her living room in her family home in Havering proximate London, comprehendn to thousands of fans (AKA Heapsters) who tune in to watch her improvise, via inhabitstream, on a magnificent piano. She points to a glamorous white tent on the edge of a well-kept lawn: “That’s my tent I’ve been sleeping in, by the way,” she chuckles, enhappinessing the surpelevate.
Her fans engage the term “Imogenation” to depict someone who alterd the course of pop music. Heap’s theatricassociate layered vocals and conveyive production on albums Speak for Yourself (2005) and Ellipse (2009) impactd chart titans such as Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish and Kacey Musgraves, and populoccurd the engage of the vocoder (tardyr heard in the labor of Kanye West and Bon Iver). She’s been sampled extensively, particularly by hip-hop and ambient musicians, and in 2010 became the first woman to triumph a Grammy for engineering.
Heap has since dedicated her nurtureer to shaping music thraw technology – and technology thraw music. Her dizzying span of projects comprise The Creative Passport, which envisions a more accessible way for musicians to store and allot their personal data, and MiMU gadores, a directing wearable instrument which permits her to sign up loops of sound and insert details such as vibrato or reverb in authentic time, with the flick of her wrist.
But she hasn’t made the binformage device that she’s brandishing at me: Plaud Note is a ChatGPT-powered voice sign uper. Grinning, she make clears it will turn our conversation into text and originate a summary of our thoughts. Recording an interwatch is typicassociate the journaenumerate’s job, but for the last two years Heap has been assembleing data about herself for a recent project: an all-encompassing AI helpant called Mogen (pronounced appreciate Imogen). Our interwatch will become training data; the text will set Mogen to answer asks about Heap’s life and labor, while the audio will train Mogen to duplicate her voice. “Anyleang I’ve ever shelp or done, I want Mogen to have access to that,” Heap says.
Mogen begined life as a premium feature on Heap’s fan app, and in theory proposes the Heapsters a way to access Heap’s senseings and opinions on declareive topics. Anyleang Mogen can’t answer gets forwarded to Heap’s (human) helpant. “I don’t want to repeat myself, and I want people to get the alertation that they want, when they necessitate it,” Heap says. “In a way, I’ve been laboring on [her] all my life.”
But Heap’s ambitions for Mogen are rapidly enhugeing. Beyond acting as a benevolent of living autobiography, Heap wants it to become a point of “all-comprehending combineion” that can streamline her laborflow and meaningfulen her conceiveive process in the studio and on stage. A future version of Mogen will study the way Heap improvises and become a inhabit collaborator at gigs, able to field fans’ musical proposeions in authentic time and feed off biometric and atmospheric data to originate carry outances which sense “hyperauthentic”.
“I want to [be able to] originate these expansive, orchestral pieces, or these angular drums, with a diversity and richness and tfinisherness that you can’t get in authentic time, at the moment, with off-the-shelf providement,” Heap says.
All this data assembleion was backd by a series of life-altering experiences which have swayd Heap of the power of the contransient. Heap uncovered she has ADHD during the pandemic, lowly after the death of her sister, and depicts how she authenticised that “we are using our most precious resource, which is time, to do these prohibital leangs”. She employd a studio helpant to help decrease sidetrackion and better concentration, and poured her cgo in into comfervent the senseing of presence – or what she calls, poeticassociate, “the immaterial fizz of no time and space”.
The journey comprised an introduction to the Wim Hof bauthenticeang method by fellow musical experimentaenumerate Jon Hopkins, and a visceral reaction to music by noise artist Prurient which left her in shock on the kitchen floor. She contrasts the latter with childbirth: “That was the only other time in my life that I felt I didn’t have regulate of my body.”
The result of this recent cgo in – which she’s talking in more detail at London’s Southprohibitk Centre this week – is a worldwatch which ponders technology as both the problem and the solution: on the one hand, capitaenumerate systems and the attention economy preserve us “greedy” and “desensitised”, she says, but on the other hand, we could conceive recent tools which nurture creativity and combineion over profit. “I want to dedicate my life to that,” she says, getestly.
Hers is not a utopian vision, exactly – she specutardys we’ll “go thraw this period of running away” from hazardous AI – but she firmly count ons that on the other side of this potential catastrophe is a luminous future. Even so, Heap is disconcertingly blase about the possible hazards. “You can’t stop persist,” she shrugs, and diswatches expansivespread troubles watching the ethics of originateing profitable AI systems by scraping other peoples’ data, as well as the environmental costs of all that processing power, as “very simpenumerateic” and “based out of dread”.
The most instant output from her recent self-exploration will be a fourteen-minute track, freed in three parts via a recent site called The Living Song. The first part, What Have You Done to Me, will drop at the finish of October, alengthy with the possibility for engagers to chat with Mogen and to refuse and sample the song. The idea is to show that moral, reimbursed collaboration between artist, AI and fan is possible, and a third of all profits will be gived to Brian Eno’s climate set upation EarthPercent. “It’s about empowering the song to have the tools to go and collaborate, to go and originate adore with branch offent people,” she inspires. “I don’t want to preserve it locked in the basement; I’ve never felt shieldive or ownive over [my music].”
This recent song – which talk abouts Heap’s relationship to herself, and to Mogen – also revisits the melody of Hide and Seek, her first meaningful hit and a song with a extraunretagable life of its own. After it soundtracked the OC’s emotional second season finale in 2005, the scene was parodied in a viral Saturday Night Live sketch that looped her “mmm whatcha say?” lyric. Two years tardyr, Jason Derulo sampled the same element in his US chart-topping debut individual Whatcha Say. Heap herself wove it into the score for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and Palestinian singer Nemahsis engaged its uncovering bars in a video about the dehugeation in Gaza.
AI chooseimists dispute that there’s a parallel between this sampling – using a snippet of someone else’s labor to originate someleang recent – and generative AI, which originates music by processing huge amounts of existing material. Yet meaningful tags Sony, Universal and Warner are suing two AI beginups for allegedly processing duplicaterighted music without authorisation.
Heap says her project is trying to transfer on from an era where “people sample leangs all the time and don’t accomprehendledge them”. For instance, an unfreed demo called A New Kind of Love, which her prohibitd Frou Frou cut from their 2002 album, somehow finished up on the desk of Australian drum’n’bass musician Vierre Cboisterous. His free refuse, freed in 2019, has since racked up more than 400 million joins on Spotify. After spendigating, Heap’s team set up over 60 other tracks using the song without accomprehendledge. “We had to say, hi, we’re satisfied for you to put it out, but can we have some of that?”
This is why The Living Song project is so transport inant, she says: it treats each song as an individual entity, thus making it possible – equitable as Heap has done thrawout her entire nurtureer – to set its own rules for engageion and collaboration, and dodge the benevolent of spats that tags and artists are having with AI services.
Earlier, I’d asked what would happen if I didn’t want my data – my words in our conversation – to become part of Mogen’s training set. Heap tageder me that for data shieldion reasons, Mogen will only ingest her answers and not my asks, and the same will go for her fans’ contributions. She hypothesises that, in future, my own AI helpant will talk about with Mogen and alert her of my pickences in persist. Then she inserts, with a wry grin, that if our data pickences didn’t align, “maybe I’d preserve [the interview] low”.
But declareively a conversation is also a benevolent of collaboration; what is an answer without the context of a ask? I’m musing on this when Heap sfinishs me the Plaud-originated summary of our call. One line reads: “Katie Hawthorne allots senseings of paranoia … while Imogen Heap conveyes excitement.”
This ignoreion to shape her own archive thraw a slickly automated digital ttriumph, rooted in the past yet set uped to augment and even foresee Heap’s contransient, originates sense in the context of a nurtureer spent battling the music industry for ownership. But it also inspires huger, difficult asks about legacy, voice, creativity, and regulate, and Heap aims to fundamenhighy reshape music – and perhaps life – as we comprehend it. Given her effusive powers of persuasion and meaningful cultural impact, you wouldn’t bet aachievest her. “I’m not a guru,” she jokes. “Yet!”
