It’s a very Imogen Heap way to say hello: “I’ve got to show you this thing – it’s going to change your life!”
She beams at me, showing off a mysterious black device. The musician and technologist is an electric, eccentric presence even on video call, talking passionately and changing thoughts like a rally driver turns corners. She whirls me from her kitchen floor to her living room in her family home in Havering near London, familiar to thousands of fans (AKA Heapsters) who tune in to watch her improvise, via livestream, on a grand 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 laughs, enjoying the surprise.
Her fans use the term “Imogenation” to describe someone who changed the course of pop music. Heap’s theatrically layered vocals and expressive production on albums Speak for Yourself (2005) and Ellipse (2009) influenced chart titans such as Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish and Kacey Musgraves, and popularised the use of the vocoder (later heard in the work 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 win a Grammy for engineering.
Heap has since dedicated her career to shaping music through technology – and technology through music. Her dizzying span of projects include The Creative Passport, which imagines a more accessible way for musicians to store and share their personal data, and MiMU gloves, a pioneering wearable instrument which allows her to record loops of sound and add details such as vibrato or reverb in real time, with the flick of her wrist.
But she hasn’t made the black device that she’s brandishing at me: Plaud Note is a ChatGPT-powered voice recorder. Grinning, she explains it will turn our conversation into text and generate a summary of our thoughts. Recording an interview is typically the journalist’s job, but for the last two years Heap has been gathering data about herself for a new project: an all-encompassing AI assistant called Mogen (pronounced like 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 her voice. “Anything I’ve ever said or done, I want Mogen to have access to that,” Heap says.
Mogen started life as a premium feature on Heap’s fan app, and in theory offers the Heapsters a way to access Heap’s feelings and opinions on certain topics. Anything Mogen can’t answer gets forwarded to Heap’s (human) assistant. “I don’t want to repeat myself, and I want people to get the information that they want, when they need it,” Heap says. “In a way, I’ve been working on [her] all my life.”
But Heap’s ambitions for Mogen are rapidly expanding. Beyond acting as a kind of living autobiography, Heap wants it to become a point of “all-knowing connection” that can streamline her workflow and deepen her 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 gigs, able to field fans’ musical suggestions in real time and feed off biometric and atmospheric data to create performances which feel “hyperreal”.
“I want to [be able to] create these wide, orchestral pieces, or these angular drums, with a diversity and richness and tenderness that you can’t get in real time, at the moment, with off-the-shelf equipment,” Heap says.
All this data collection was inspired by a series of life-altering experiences which have convinced Heap of the power of the present. Heap discovered she has ADHD during the pandemic, shortly after the death of her sister, and describes how she realised that “we are using our most precious resource, which is time, to do these banal things”. She hired a studio assistant to help reduce distraction and improve concentration, and poured her focus into understanding the feeling of presence – or what she calls, poetically, “the immaterial fizz of no time and space”.
The journey included an introduction to the Wim Hof breathing method by fellow musical experimentalist Jon Hopkins, and a visceral reaction to music by noise artist Prurient which left her in shock on the kitchen floor. She compares the latter with childbirth: “That was the only other time in my life that I felt I didn’t have control of my body.”
The result of this new focus – which she’s discussing in more detail at London’s Southbank Centre this week – is a worldview which considers technology as both the problem and the solution: on the one hand, capitalist systems and the attention economy keep us “greedy” and “desensitised”, she says, but on the other hand, we could invent new tools which nurture creativity and connection over profit. “I want to dedicate my life to that,” she says, earnestly.
Hers is not a utopian vision, exactly – she speculates we’ll “go through this period of running away” from dangerous AI – but she firmly believes that on the other side of this potential disaster is a bright future. Even so, Heap is disconcertingly blase about the possible risks. “You can’t stop progress,” she shrugs, and dismisses widespread concerns regarding the ethics of building profitable AI systems by scraping other peoples’ data, as well as the environmental costs of all that processing power, as “very simplistic” and “based out of fear”.
The most immediate output from her recent self-exploration will be a fourteen-minute track, released in three parts via a new site called The Living Song. The first part, What Have You Done to Me, will drop at the end of October, along with the possibility for users to chat with Mogen and to remix and sample the song. The idea is to demonstrate that ethical, compensated collaboration between artist, AI and fan is possible, and a third of all profits will be donated to Brian Eno’s climate foundation EarthPercent. “It’s about empowering the song to have the tools to go and collaborate, to go and make love with different people,” she urges. “I don’t want to keep it locked in the basement; I’ve never felt protective or possessive over [my music].”
This new song – which negotiates Heap’s relationship to herself, and to Mogen – also revisits the melody of Hide and Seek, her first major hit and a song with a remarkable life of its own. After it soundtracked the OC’s dramatic 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 later, Jason Derulo sampled the same element in his US chart-topping debut single Whatcha Say. Heap herself wove it into the score for 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’s a parallel between this sampling – using a snippet of someone else’s work to make something new – and generative AI, which creates music by processing vast amounts of existing material. Yet major labels Sony, Universal and Warner are suing two AI startups for allegedly processing copyrighted music without authorisation.
Heap says her project is trying to move on from an era where “people sample things all the time and don’t credit them”. For instance, an unreleased demo called A New Kind of Love, which her 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 racked up more than 400 million plays on Spotify. After investigating, Heap’s team found over 60 other tracks using the song without credit. “We had to say, hi, we’re happy for you to put it out, but can we have some of that?”
This is why The Living Song project is so important, she says: it treats each song as an individual entity, thus making it possible – just as Heap has done throughout her entire career – to set its own rules for interaction and collaboration, and avoid the kind of spats that labels 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 told me that for data protection reasons, Mogen will only ingest her answers and not my questions, and the same will go for her fans’ contributions. She hypothesises that, in future, my own AI assistant will negotiate with Mogen and notify her of my preferences in advance. Then she adds, with a wry grin, that if our data preferences didn’t align, “maybe I’d keep [the interview] short”.
But surely a conversation is also a kind of collaboration; what is an answer without the context of a question? I’m musing on this 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 her own archive through a slickly automated digital twin, rooted in the past yet designed to augment and even predict Heap’s present, makes sense in the context of a career spent battling the music industry for ownership. But it also provokes larger, difficult questions about legacy, voice, creativity, and control, and Heap aims to fundamentally reshape music – and perhaps life – as we know it. Given her effusive powers of persuasion and deep cultural influence, you wouldn’t bet against her. “I’m not a guru,” she jokes. “Yet!”
• Imogen Heap: Creating With the Audience is at Southbank Centre, London, Wednesday 16 October, as part of BFI London film festival’s LFF Expanded strand
