“I have to show you this – it’s going to change your life!” is the very Imogen Heap way of greeting.

She smiled at me and showed off a mysterious black device. The musician and technologist is an evocative and eccentric presence even on video calls, speaking with passion and changing his mind like a rally driver turning a corner. She swivels me from the kitchen floor to the living room of her parents’ home in Havering, near London. It’s familiar to the thousands of fans (aka Heapsters) who tune in to watch her improvise on the grand piano on livestreams. “By the way, that’s the tent I’ve been sleeping in,” she laughed, enjoying the surprise, pointing to an attractive white tent at the edge of the manicured lawn.

Her fans use the term “Imogeneration” to describe someone who changed the course of pop music. Heap’s theatrically layered vocals and expressive production on the albums Speak for Yourself (2005) and Ellipse (2009) have inspired the likes of Ariana Grande, Billie Eilish, and Casey. It influenced chart giants such as Musgraves and popularized the use of the vocoder (later heard in the works of Kanye West and Bon Iver). She has been widely sampled, especially by hip-hop and ambient musicians, and in 2010 became the first woman to win a Grammy Award in the engineering category.

Since then, Heap has dedicated his career to shaping music through technology, and shaping technology through music. Her fast-paced projects include The Creative Passport, which envisions a more accessible way for musicians to store and share personal data, and a pioneering project that lets you record loops of sound and add details like vibrato and reverb. These include the MiMU glove, a wearable instrument. In real time just by moving your wrist.

But she didn’t create the black device she’s brandishing at me. Plaud Note is a voice recorder that uses ChatGPT. She laughed and explained that this converts our conversations into text and generates a summary of our thoughts. Recording interviews is typically the job of journalists, but for the past two years, Heap has been collecting data about herself for a new project: a comprehensive AI assistant called Mogen (pronounced like Imogen). Our interviews become training data. The text prepares Morgen to answer questions about Heep’s life and work, and the audio trains Morgen to reproduce her voice. “Everything I’ve ever said or done, I want Morgen to have access to,” Heap says.

Mogen was born as a premium feature of Heap’s fan app, theoretically giving Heapsters a way to access Heap’s sentiments and opinions on certain topics. Anything Mogen can’t answer is forwarded to Heap’s (human) assistant. “I don’t want to repeat myself. I want to make sure people have the information they need, when they need it,” Heap says. “In a way, I have been working on [her] For the rest of my life.”

But Heep’s ambitions for Morgen are rapidly expanding. Beyond its role as a kind of living autobiography, Heap hopes to become a point of “omniscient connection” that can streamline workflow and deepen the creative process in the studio and on stage. Future versions of Mogen will explore how Heap can improvise live, become a live collaborator, process fan musical suggestions in real time, and feed biometric and atmospheric data to create You’ll be able to create performances that feel “realistic.”

“I want to [be able to] “Right now, we can create broad orchestral pieces and angular drums with a variety, richness, and tenderness that you just can’t get in real time with off-the-shelf equipment,” says Heap.

All of this data collection was inspired by a series of life-changing experiences that convinced Heap of his current power. Heap, who discovered she had ADHD during the pandemic and shortly after her sister’s death, said: “We’re using our most precious resource, our time, to do these mundane things.” He explains what he noticed. She hired a studio assistant to reduce distractions and improve focus, and to understand the sense of presence, or what she poetically calls “an immaterial bubble without time and space.” I concentrated.

The journey included an introduction to Wim Hof ​​breathing techniques by fellow music experimenter John Hopkins and a visceral response to music by noise artist Pullian, which left her shocked on her kitchen floor. Ta. She likens the latter to childbirth. “That was the only time in my life that I felt like I wasn’t in control of my body.”

The result of this new focus, which she will discuss in more detail this week at London’s Southbank Center, is a worldview that sees technology as both a problem and a solution. On the other hand, the capitalist system and attention economy make us “greedy.” “We have become desensitized,” she says, but in the meantime, we might be able to invent new tools that foster creativity and connection over profit. “I want to dedicate my life to it,” she says seriously.

Her vision isn’t exactly utopian. She speculates that we “will go through this period of running away” from dangerous AI. But she firmly believes there is a bright future on the other side of this potential disaster. Even so, Heap remains perplexingly sour about the possible risks. “You can’t stop progress,” she shrugs, dismissing widespread concerns about the ethics of scraping other people’s data to build profitable AI systems and the environmental costs of all that processing power as “very simple.” “I scoff. It’s based on fear.”

The most direct result of her recent soul-searching will be a 14-minute track released in three parts via a new site called The Living Song. The first part, “What Have You Done to Me,” will be available at the end of October and will allow users to chat with Mogen and remix or sample the song. The idea is to demonstrate that ethical and compensatory collaboration between artists, AI, and fans is possible, with one-third of all profits going to Brian Eno’s climate change foundation Earth%. Masu. “This song gives you the tools to collaborate and love with different people,” she emphasizes. “I don’t want to be kept in a basement. I’ve never felt protective or possessive. [my music]”

The new song, which tells the story of Heap and her relationship with herself and Morgen, also reimagines the melody of “Hide and Seek,” her first big hit and a song that has had a remarkable life in its own right. After being used as the soundtrack for The O.C.’s dramatic second season finale in 2005, the scene was parodied in a Saturday Night Live sketch that looped her “Um, what are you talking about?” It went viral. lyrics. Two years later, Jason Derulo sampled the same elements in his debut single “Whatcha Say,” which topped the US charts. Heap himself included the song in his score for Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, and Palestinian singer Nemasis used the opening bars of a video about the devastation in Gaza.

AI optimists see similarities between this sampling (using parts of someone else’s work to create something new) and generative AI, which processes vast amounts of existing material to create music. I claim that there is. But major labels Sony, Universal and Warner are suing two AI startups for processing their copyrighted music without their permission.

Ms Heap said her project was trying to move on from the days when “people were always trying something and not evaluating it”. For example, an unreleased demo called “A New Kind of Love” cut from her band Frou Frou’s 2002 album somehow ended up on the desk of Australian drum and bass musician Veerre Cloud. His loose remix, released in 2019, has since been streamed over 400 million times on Spotify. After researching, Heap’s team discovered that there are more than 60 other tracks that use the song without credit. “We had to say: Hello, we’re glad you put it out there, but could we have some?”

This is why The Living Song project is so important, she says. Treating each song as a separate entity allows Heap to set and work around its own rules for interaction and collaboration, as it has throughout its career. It’s like labels and artists fighting over AI services.

Previously, I asked what happens if I don’t want my data (my words in the conversation) to be part of Mogen’s training set. Heap said that for data protection reasons, Morgen would only incorporate her answers, not my questions, and the same would be true for fan submissions. She hypothesizes that in the future, my own AI assistant will negotiate with Morgen and inform me of my preferences in advance. She then added with a wry smile that if we didn’t like the data, “I’d probably leave it alone.” [the interview] short”.

But certainly, conversation is also a type of collaboration. What is the answer to a question without context? As I was thinking about this, Heap sent me a summary of the call that Plaud had generated. One line reads: “Katie Hawthorn shares feelings of paranoia, while Imogen Heap expresses excitement.”

This mission to form her own archive through a cleverly automated digital twin, rooted in the past but designed to extend and even predict Heap’s present, is a battle with the music industry over ownership. It makes sense in the context of a career spent in . But it also raises bigger, more difficult questions about heritage, voice, creativity, and control, and Heap aims to fundamentally reshape music, and perhaps life, as we know it. Given her outpouring of persuasion and deep cultural influence, it’s hard to resist her. “I’m not a guru,” she jokes. “still!”