It’s a very Imogen Heap way of saying hello: “I have to show you this: it’s going to change your life!”
She smiles at me, showing a mysterious black device. The musician and technologist is an electric, eccentric presence even on video calls, speaking passionately and shifting his thoughts like a rally driver turns a corner. She takes me from her kitchen floor to the living room of her family home in Havering, near London, familiar to thousands of fans (aka Heapsters) who tune in to watch her improvise, via live stream, on a grand piano. He points to a glamorous white tent at the edge of a manicured lawn: “By the way, that’s my tent I’ve been sleeping in,” he laughs, enjoying the surprise.
His fans use the term “Imogenation” to describe someone who changed the course of pop music. Heap’s layered theatrical vocals and expressive production on the albums Speak for Yourself (2005) and Ellipse (2009) influenced chart titans such as Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish and Kacey Musgraves, and popularized the use of the vocoder (later heard in Kanye West’s work). and Bon Iver). She has been sampled extensively, particularly by hip-hop and ambient musicians, and in 2010 became the first woman to win a Grammy for engineering.
Since then, Heap has dedicated his career to shaping music through technology, and technology through music. Their dizzying array of projects includes The Creative Passport, which imagines a more accessible way for musicians to store and share their personal data, and the MiMU Gloves, a pioneering wearable instrument that lets you record sound loops and add details like vibrato or reverb. . in real time, with a flick of the wrist.
But she hasn’t made the black device she shows me: the Plaud Note is a voice recorder powered by ChatGPT. Smiling, he explains that he will convert our conversation to text and generate a summary of our thoughts. Recording an interview is usually the journalist’s job, but for the past two years, Heap has been collecting data about herself for a new project: a comprehensive AI assistant called Mogen (pronounced Imogen). Our interview will become training data; The text will prepare Mogen to answer questions about Heap’s life and work, while the audio will train Mogen to replicate his voice. “I want Mogen to have access to everything he said or did,” Heap says.
Mogen began life as a premium feature on the Heap fan app, and in theory offers Heapsters a way to access Heap’s feelings and opinions on certain topics. Anything Mogen can’t respond to is forwarded to Heap’s (human) assistant. “I don’t want to repeat myself and I want people to get the information they want, when they need it,” Heap says. “In a way, I’ve been working on (it) my whole life.”
But Heap’s ambitions for Mogen are expanding rapidly. Beyond acting as a kind of living autobiography, Heap wants it to become an “omniscient connection” point that can streamline your workflow and deepen your creative process in the studio and on stage. A future version of Mogen will study the way Heap improvises and become a live collaborator at concerts, able to receive musical suggestions from fans in real time and feed off biometric and atmospheric data to create performances that feel “hyper-realistic.” “.
“I want to (be able to) create these broad orchestral pieces, or these angular drums, with a diversity and richness and tenderness that you can’t get in real time, right now, with off-the-shelf equipment. ” says a lot.
All of this data collection was inspired by a series of life-changing experiences that have convinced Heap of the power of the present. Heap discovered he had ADHD during the pandemic, shortly after his sister died, and describes how he realized that “we are using our most precious resource, which is time, to do these banal things.” She hired a studio assistant to help her reduce distraction and improve concentration, and focused on understanding the feeling of presence, or what she calls, poetically, “the immaterial effervescence of the absence of time and space.”
The trip included an introduction to Wim Hof’s breathing method by fellow music experimenter Jon Hopkins, and a visceral reaction to noise artist Prurient’s music that left her in shock on the kitchen floor. Compare the latter to childbirth: “That was the only time in my life when I felt like I had no control over my body.”
The result of this new approach – which she will discuss in more detail at London’s Southbank Center this week – is a worldview that sees technology as both the problem and the solution: on the one hand, capitalist systems and the economy of attention keep us “greedy”. and “desensitized,” he says, but on the other hand, we could invent new tools that encourage creativity and connection over profits. “I want to dedicate my life to that,” he says seriously.
His is not exactly a utopian vision – he speculates that “we will go through this period of running away” from dangerous AI – but he firmly believes that on the other side of this potential disaster there is a bright future. Still, Heap is disconcertingly indifferent to the potential risks. “You can’t stop progress,” he shrugs, dismissing widespread concerns about the ethics of building profitable AI systems by mining other people’s data, as well as the environmental costs of all that processing power, as “very simplistic.” ” and “fear-based.”
The most immediate result of his recent self-exploration will be a fourteen-minute track, released in three parts through a new site called The Living Song. The first part, What Have You Done to Me, will be released at the end of October, along with the ability for users to chat with Mogen and remix and sample the song. The idea is to demonstrate that a paid, ethical collaboration between artist, AI and fans is possible, with a third of all profits donated to Brian Eno’s EarthPercent climate foundation. “It’s about empowering the song so that it has the tools to collaborate, to make love with different people,” he urges. “I don’t want to keep him locked in the basement; “I have never felt protective or possessive of (my music).”
Negotiating Heap’s relationship with herself and Mogen, this new song also takes up the melody of Hide and Seek, her first big hit and a song with an extraordinary life of its own. After he soundtracked the dramatic finale of OC’s second season in 2005, the scene was parodied in a viral Saturday Night Live sketch that played his “hmm, what do you say?” lyric. Two years later, Jason Derulo tried the same element on his US chart-topping debut single, Whatcha Say. Heap herself wove it into the score of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and Palestinian singer Nemahsis used its opening bars in a video about the devastation in Gaza.
AI optimists argue that there is a parallel between this sampling (using a fragment of someone else’s work to create something new) and generative AI, which creates music by processing large amounts of existing material. However, major record labels Sony, Universal and Warner are suing two AI startups for allegedly processing copyrighted music without authorization.
Heap says his project attempts to leave behind an era in which “people try things all the time and don’t give them credit.” For example, an unreleased demo called A New Kind of Love, which his band Frou Frou cut from their 2002 album, somehow ended up on the desk of Australian drum’n’bass musician Vierre Cloud. His loose remix, released in 2019, has since amassed over 400 million streams on Spotify. After investigating, Heap’s team found over 60 more tracks using the song without credit. “We had to say, hey, we’re happy you posted it, but can we have some of that?”
That’s why The Living Song project is so important, he says: it treats each song as an individual entity, allowing (as Heap has done throughout his career) to establish his own rules of interaction and collaboration, and avoid the kind of disputes that labels and artists are having with artificial intelligence services.
Previously, I had 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 told me that for data protection reasons, Mogen will only digest his answers and not my questions, and the same will be true for his fans’ contributions. She hypothesizes that in the future, my own AI assistant will negotiate with Mogen and notify him of my preferences in advance. He then adds, with a wry smile, that if our data preferences didn’t match, “maybe I would make (the interview) short.”
But surely a conversation is also a type of collaboration; What is an answer without the context of a question? I’m mulling this over when Heap sends me the Plaud-generated summary of our call. One line reads: “Katie Hawthorne shares feelings of paranoia… while Imogen Heap expresses excitement.”
This mission to shape his own archive through a cleverly automated digital twin, rooted in the past but designed to augment and even predict Heap’s present, makes sense in the context of a career dedicated to fighting the media industry. music around the property. But it also raises bigger, harder questions about legacy, voice, creativity and control, and Heap aims to fundamentally reshape music – and perhaps life – as we know it. Given his effusive powers of persuasion and profound cultural influence, I wouldn’t bet against him. “I’m not a guru,” he jokes. “Still!”