Imogen Heap - The Intersection Of Music And Tech

Hello and welcome to this Sound on Sound podcast about electronic music and or things synth. I'm Caro C, and in this episode I'm talking to Imogen Heap, a self-produced composer, recording artist and innovator. Imogen's released five albums and her compositions pop up in film and countless TV shows. She has won two Grammys and an Ivor Novello Award. In recognition of her pioneering work at the intersection of music and tech, Imogen also has three honorary doctorates for her gestural music wear, the Mimu Gloves, and more recently for the Creative Passport and Integrated Digital ID Solution. More about these imminently. So, a taste of Imogen's music to get us started. Here's a short extract from the score she created for the theatre show. Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, which is one of the biggest hits in theatrical history. Do do do da dip, do do do da dip do do do do, do do do da dip, do do do do da dip, do do do da dip. In the light of no truth, the surety levels are rising. In the spin of breaking news, you drop your confidence in happiness. Hi Imogen and welcome To the sound on sound electronic music channel podcast. Hello, Caro. Very happy to be here. I came across you as a fellow, um, electronic music maker when you were beavering away on your Ellipse album. And a few things struck me, obviously, how you really wanted to connect with your audience as much as possible. But also how you were setting up your Pro Tools setup in, I believe, your childhood home. So, yeah, I wonder if you can tell us a bit about how is that studio doing now and how things have developed since then. Yeah. Well, that's right. I grew up in this house. Well, I lived there for, actually, about eight years, really. Anyway, time moved on, and the house was going to be sold, and at the time, I had money, because I just signed an amazing publishing deal, but I still, I think, I'm paying back. And as a result of that, yeah, I got this house. It's just got this amazing vibe, and everyone who goes there Just feels creative, me included. It's a funny shape, it's elliptical. It was built in 1790. This is in Havering. It's kind of on the, on the edge of the, the, the green fringes of East London, uh, almost Essex. So we're trying to make it work, and it is working now as a residential studio, thanks to Alexei Michalak, and he's the one really responsible for bringing it into this great space, which people love, absolutely love it. So I go there when I can, and I go and make my own music. But in the house, there's also I mean, there's an incredible amount of mainly percussive instruments, because, you know, I'm not, I don't really play the guitar. I mean, I play it very badly, and I can kind of make it half sound, half decent in the, in the studio. But more, it's, it's just loads of percussion, loads of drums, and sets of drums, and funny little weird instruments that my sister would buy me every Christmas. Bells, and glockenspiels, that kind of stuff. A few hacked pianos, kind of, uh, prepared pianos. Bits of And then we also have this amazing barn, which up until about four years ago was still stuffed full of hay and rats. And then we moved the hay and rats. The main body of it hosts now my production rehearsal space, and we can also rent that out. And it has this huge sound reactive light tree, LED tree that we first commissioned, um, for the Reverb Festival that I curated. So we have this crazy tree in the barn and it really brings it to life and we have weddings there sometimes. So it's just trying to make the best of this really magic space that really is financially. Quite difficult to keep up, but I think we're going to make it and in time my grand plan is to turn it into a cultural beacon for, you know, the outer edges of London and develop all kinds of projects there around audience interaction and VR and XR and obviously gestural music devices, um, such as the gloves. And just experiment, really, do what, do what I do, but also enable other people to experiment their own projects there too. And would you say within your sort of studio setup, are you more leaning towards hardware or software? Software, just because I'm lazy, really. I'm just like, there it is, I'll use that. I'm not really like, I'll stretch over there and turn this thing on. I'm just really like impulsive and just want to get it all done. So I'm mainly just using software. But also, I never really had the money when I was younger to buy bits of kit. I came into this producing world of my own music, um, just at the time when software was coming into force. And you could get really good plugins, you know, within protools at the time, and software synths and all that stuff. So I didn't really And also I didn't have any space, so I just used what was in the box. And I really loved it because I was, I could travel light, I could do my shows live, you know, well, as the computers got faster. I don't actually have that much outboard gear, um, I just got the bits I like. I've got my Avalon 737 for my mic. I've got a few mics. I mean, there are bits in the studio, but I just never use them. It's basically just my Avalon and a mic and then somehow make it, make it work. And in terms of, do you have any favourite software that you're quite loyal to? I really like iZotope. I mean, I've always used Waves. And I think actually what Antaris is doing, you know, I have chats with Antaris because I do a lot of stuff with my voice, obviously, and I love to get in there. early and just suggest things and try out stuff. So I do use quite a bit of Antares stuff. And then I like obviously my box of tricks. I've developed this, we call it the box of tricks with Sonic Couture about four years ago and it was like amazing timing. I was going to go on tour and before I went on tour. I was thinking, wouldn't it be great to have all of these nice percussive instruments in the box? Like have all my vibraphone recorded really nicely, all the things that I, like body percussion, all my voice just going, ah, like nicely mapped out on a keyboard and my whirlies. And so I could play my whirlies with my gloves, but not actually take the whirlies and. It's great. And then this incredible opportunity happened from a friend to say, we'd really love to use your music in this play that we're working on. And it turned out to be Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. Having this virtual instrument at my fingertips in the theatre, because I made all the music in situ, while they were doing their production rehearsals and their workshops. And so I literally had a keyboard, my box of tricks, I had my little microphone and my Avalon, and my computer, and I did all the music there. Working remotely with Alexi who was in the studio, pulling stems from old songs and kind of building up stuff from that. Wow, brilliant. So tell us more about the Mimu Gloves. Well, the Mimu Gloves started as a passion project, I think about 10 years ago. I'd been trying to think of a way to simplify my live system so that I had less leads and less things to prepare for the show. I was trying to be able to invite spontaneity in when I wanted to record a loop and where I wanted to record it. So if I wanted to just run over to the drum kit. and record Chris play the drums and have that loop and then build on that and put some effects on it. Initially I would have to wire in, you know, all the recording, a stereo bounce down mix or whatever of his drums into Ableton, etc, etc. So that would take time and I'd have to do that for all the instrumentalists, so So then I was like, oh no, I realised that when I saw, I think it was Thomas Bloch. I think he's called Thomas Bloch and he plays the crystal bassoon. And he also plays the glass harmonica. And so to do that, it's basically like a bunch of glasses, you know, all tuned to different pitches. And he had this microphone that's kind of stuck onto the You know, inside of his wrist, a lapel mic, basically. And I was like, that is genius! That's how you mic up a wine glass, of course, because the sound moves with your finger on the rim. So I took that idea and I had a couple of them, one on each of my wrists, and I had my little wireless packs. And I would go up to the violin and I'd record the violin and the drums and I'd just have this stereo pair. of microphones on my wrists, but I wish that I could be able to then catch the sound in the moment instead of having to run back to base station, press record, run over there. So I had all these different sensors like around where I could touch that over there, this block over here, or that thing was a, it was a really complicated iCubeX, took ages to set up. And then I was like, if only I could just do it on my body, you know, what could I have? And then I realized that I could use a glove. I could have a thing on my hand, my actual hand, that would be fingerless, and I could just do the action of the record. And when I realized that, because I saw somebody else do it, I saw this woman called Ellie Jessop. She had a glove called the Vamp System, and she was developing it at MIT Media Lab. And she showed me this simple gesture, and my whole head just exploded, and that's it! That's what I need to do! Um, she was singing, and then she She made a pinching action, like an okay sign, while she was singing. So she was going, ah, and then for a little split second, she tapped her fingers together, and at that point, the computer recognised that sliver of sound, detected what tone was, and then generated a signal from that. And then she had a sine wave, and then she would move her arm, her kind of wrist, back and forth, and create a vibrato effect. And I was like, Oh, you are wonderful, thank you. And I really wanted to develop the system with her, but I wasn't allowed. Was she using Ableton? She wasn't. It had its own little system and it wasn't integrated with anything. And at the time, that's all it did. It was like catch and then vibrato. But the idea exploded in my mind and I was like, this is fantastic. Of course, you could just use your hands. That's brilliant. Genius. Because I'm using my hands and half the time I'm just walking around, you know, gesticulating anyway. And if I'm not playing the piano, I'm completely free, you know, or it's drums or whatever. So, that was it. I came back and I was like, right, I need to find somebody who can help me make a glove music system. And the only person I knew was this guy called Tom Mitchell, who'd worked with me before on programming a mono for a David Letterman show. And he was great. He was a teacher. And that was that. So he put, um, a grant in, he tried, well, he got ten grand from University of West England and we bought a pair of 5DT gloves, which are optical sensor gloves. And with that, he started to neural network recognize postures. And then that was the very early beginnings, which was just that we, it's called sound grasp originally. And so I could just record my voice. With my fist, for example, and then let it go, or loop it with my hand. And it was all, you know, its own system, it wasn't connected to anything. And we thought we were really cool and great and it was amazing. But then we were like, oh, but now we need to do something else. We need to have something that's more granular and movement, you know, like up and down and left and right. So then we started adding more sensors, and we started to get more team, and then we started to, instead of like this weird Heath Robinson kind of strapped together thing that kept falling apart, we eventually got this woman called Hannah Perna Wilson in to make us an integrated glove. And then we got the Wi Fi on board with Sensor Seb, as we call him, Seb Magic, and he did the hardware development. And then it was all integrated. And this happened like over, you know, a long period of time. And then really the big shift was when we got Adam Stark in. He came in as a Max Programmer out of desperation, really. We were just like, Kelly, who's working with me, Kelly Snick, she was like my Alexei of then. She was previous to that. She was working with NASA as a NASA scientist. And we sent a tweet out ahead of a big show that I was going to do in my garden. And we needed a programmer, a Max Programmer. So we said, who's the best Max Programmer? In London, and somebody suggested Adam Stark, and then he came over, and we thought he'd be around for two weeks to just develop this little instrument for us so that we could lock in to our pitch or our yaw, up and down or left or right, um, scales, so we could, you know, map scales to point, particular points in space, and then about five years in he's still he's just there every day just pushing and pushing and now that first thing that he started to develop Which we start we called Glover at the time Which is just a ginormous max patch which did everything you could need it to do But it was all in one screen and it was really insane to get your head around and we developed this song called me the machine I basically set us a goal. I was like I want to be able to write and and perform a song entirely with the gloves, with no other kit. And now Glover is this incredible, incredible software, which actually, quite timely. It's released on the 4th of February, and it is fantastic. It's the jewel of our crown. It's the, a lot of people think it's the Gloves, the gloves are, you know, they're great and they're beautiful, they're expensive. Um, not for what they are, you know, they're top, top of the range, nothing, nothing else in the world you can get like it. But this is the brains, this is the bit, this is the magic which connects your gestural, you know, self to whatever software you're using, whether it's Ableton whatever. And so, without that. It's basically useless, but the great thing about it is now if you don't have, you know, a couple grand spare to buy yourself some fancy gloves, then you can buy a Leap, uh, for example, for, what is it, 50 quid, and do a large proportion of what you can do with the gloves without the freedom of space because you're limited to a But it's a really great way to get your hand in, um, to gestural music interfacing. There's just nothing like that that does it. Take something external, and if you're not a coder, I'm not a coder. What do you do? You have to build it all from scratch in order to do something expressive with, you know, great powerful music live tools like Ableton. But there's, to do anything in between, I mean, you've got Macs. It's a massive learning curve. So this just, just, you don't need to do that now. Have your whatever input, whether it's a phone, whether it's your Leap, whether it's your Myo wristband, whatever you want to use. And then you have your OSC output mappings or your MIDI mappings. And I, I really believe That it's gonna transform, you know, musical performance for so many people. We just have to let them know about it. So now we have told you are the first person I believe that I've spoken to about that. 'cause we only just discovered our 4th of February release. And so how has your life So obviously you're using the gloves when you perform and what else have you got going on? Yeah, I mean, it's just beyond measure, the difference. So my last tour, the one I just did, I think I did 45 dates or something like that. And the amount of kit that I personally took, not the band, but the amount of kit I took was just tiny in comparison to what I would have taken the tour before and the cost of transportation and the carnage and you know, it was a real nightmare and just it made it not viable to tour really in a way. I mean, I had this perspex piano and I mean, there's no need to have perspex piano, but I just didn't want to look like an X stand, you know, little kind of stick insect on the, on the stage. So I, we built this perspex piano with some lights in it. And um, I had my, you know, weighted keyboard in there, and my computer, and another screen, and a, can't remember what it was called, a Lima, I think it was called, like a touchscreen thing, couple of touchscreen things, a bunch of little MIDI keyboards, another station over there with my Ambera, and another set of, you know, sensors and stuff to happen, another microphone, it was like so, so much stuff. And this time it was It was almost like, I'm naked, what's going on? But because I had my gloves, and I felt so connected all the time, and I felt I could be just so expressive and spontaneous, I felt completely integrated with my kit, and never detaching myself in any, at any moment with the audience. Very rarely never looked, I never looked at my screen, but I had tons of stuff going on in there. Mainly vocal effects, or, you know, just parameter changes within. say a keyboard sound like to make something swell or be more distorted or have more reverb in it depending on the kind of angle of my wrist for example and they're always the same it's like i have this language where i catch my voice it's always mainly on my right hand but and it feels like oh that must be really difficult to remember but it's not it's just totally normal it's totally not it's like how you would imagine it should be you just like catch your voice move it over there to the right maybe over there to the left it just does what it should do And actually, in some ways, it's quite underwhelming to watch, because you're like, Oh, well, so watch, it's moving a hand over there and the sound's going over there, and you're like, yes, but nobody did that before. I mean, they did, you know, Letitia Tsunami did. Um, and a few people have done that, but not to this kind of, well, I'd never done it before. And loads of people in the audience have never seen that before. But it was just this sense of, Fully, like, grounded, connected, never detaching, completely free of motion. I mean, to the point where I would be sometimes coming at the back of the audience, just manipulating all these sounds, using Reaktor, using the Box of Tricks, using whatever synths, coming in, bringing in samples, just fluidly, not even thinking, not even worried, far away from my You know, right at the back of the hall coming in and at the same time, actually, with a live show, sometimes if we could get the right physical space, we would have three 60 sound with D and B soundscape to test out this gesture interfacing with their kit. So with OSC, we were sending messages to their X and Y and Zed and I was moving sound around the room as I was walking through the audience. Petra, our wonderful sound lady, would be also kind of positioning me where I was coming into the audience by You know, that exact point, um, in the audience and bringing me forward. So instead of people going, where's Imogen? Where is she? You know, looking around in some stereo wash of sound, they know exactly because they can instinctively feel the sound over there. So it's really just transformed everything and I, I'm just so grateful that it's actually Well, hopefully going to continue to be a sustainable product because it means that I'm always going to be supported to be able to do this, you know, myself and a couple of hundred other Glovers that are out there in the world, you know, steadily growing and the more obviously we make, the more affordable we can make it, but I'm really excited for Glover because I think it's going to really open up people's minds about, you know, just with a small amount of kit, they can do to kind of emancipate themselves from this kind of 2D world. That's what it feels like. It's like you're up and you're down and you're, you know, but you're just these amazing bodies that we have. And they're so limited, um, not with an acoustic instrument, obviously you've got the body and the sound coming through a violin or a piano, but everything else is just like, it just feels awkward because it is. Well, there's barriers, isn't there, via the technology, but also it's bringing back, it's bringing it back to the physical, it's bringing it back to the human, and it's also bringing it back to, uh, communication is what, is it 5, 10 percent is actually what you say, the rest is what else is going on in your, in your system kind of thing, so it's really bringing it back to that, and you can see that it's obviously really, as you say, it's really natural, it's really intuitive for you that it must feel great to free yourself from the shackles of that. It's really, really great. And I imagine you are currently developing digital online performance as well. Yeah, that's right. Um, yeah. And also VR recently as well, just kind of taking the gloves into the VR space. Um, I mean, I had done a tiny bit of that with Wave XR. We did this great, um, immersive VR experience. We recorded it in the barn and then you can go and. experience this live and go into a room and see me perform these three songs. And then sometimes I would come into the foyer at the end and chat to people at the end, chat to people all over the world who'd just been to see me perform, you know, these three songs. And that just really opened my mind to how we can. communicate with each other from all over the world, all different time zones. And there I just am in my living room, just having a chat to these guys. And I just, that was like about three years before I went on tour. So it was like, Hmm, there's something about this. So for me now, um, you know, as well as the fact that we all can't go anywhere and we can't tour, I'm really, really want to develop that space, um, for myself, for the fans and explore. You know, what we can't do in the physical world and take it on to the next, the next stage and use the gloves as a way to instead of having controllers, you know, I use my gloves and I can change the particles by stretching my arm out at the same time as putting my reverb out and there's just this extra dimension of connectivity that feels very intuitive. It is very intuitive. Um, so I did my first live VR improvisation set just before the new year. I love how you're still finding ways to keep all that connection, keep that connection going, and you've even got an AI chair. Yes, so I have a chair that, uh, we hacked with a bunch of students from Middlesex University. I got commissioned by Eric Whittaker to Make a piece of music for his prom, an acapella piece. And I always liked to put an acapella piece on my records ever since Hide and Seek. And so, I created this piece of music called The Listening Chair. Now, I created a chair because I thought, I want to know What is the song that still needs to be written? I thought maybe there would be like a resounding topic that people who sat in the chair, who would talk about ideas, would come up with a song idea and then I would write about it. But of course that didn't happen. But what did happen was different age groups would be interested in similar things or a similar approach to a song. So it might be at the older you got, the more you kind of started to think about the environment or other people, your effect on other people, their effect on you. Whereas if you're a teenager, you might only be thinking about how the world was a bit unfair and you don't really fit in, but it's okay to be yourself. So this is, this song came about, um, call the listening chair. That's one song, one minute. Equals seven minutes of my life, and I still have to write the next minute because I'm now past my due date of seven years. Anyway, the listening chair, that's how it began. So it's kind of teched up, it's got a microphone, it's got a camera, it's got a little tablet, it's got speakers, some lights, um, it's got a heart rate monitor, and a little visor that you pull across, and you're basically cocooned in this egg chair. But now, as a result of lockdown, I worked with Superpass. Actually a few years ago to create my own little app space for my fans to just have Access to whatever music they want of mine in one place including demos including rough ideas You could do it for two pound a month. Okay, long story short now you sit in the chair the fans Get a ticket to ask me a question if a Imogen can't answer it. So a Imogen is called She's augmented Imogen. It's basically a chat bot. It's basically powered by IBM Watson, but we need to stuff it full of knowledge about me and we need to you know Train this to speak like me or speak like herself or some combination of and we just decided the other day that we were going To call the answers are going to be in the we form the royal we so she's answering for us for me and her, or me and it, or whatever she ends up being in time. So, it's a place where the fans can come in and they can ask me a question. And, because I'm not really on social media anymore, so now my fans come to this place, there's a few hundred of them, and we chat very, very openly and candidly. I sit in there often for like two and a half hours, and we just talk about whatever. And it's just this magic connection. There's no distractions. I'm just there literally to focus, to talk. And that's so rare. So, the answer's come out of me, in very long form, as you're witnessing. And then we take that audio, and the fans now start, we've created, Justin Butler, who's the kind of lead of the tech side of it, is um, pulling in the, we've got, uh, audio comes in as, Text now, so it transcribes and then we also have an emotional Recognizing kind of the software recognizes my emotions in a way So it's just another bit of contextual data to go with that in time that we might you know So give you some extra dimension for how a image and might express herself in the future Perhaps there's some lights or a city or a beach who knows and then there's also yet the video obviously So question and answer fans go in They attribute themselves as editing that content. So it might be like, is there going to be another FooFoo record, for example? And then my long winded answer. And then they would truncate it. The team would check it for format. I would check it for fact. And then we would publish it to A Imagine for that question to come up again. So then they wouldn't get a ticket for me to speak next time. They have to come up with a better question. So the idea is that I never repeat myself ever again. But basically it's just going on all the time. And what drove you to Also make the creative passport happen. Most of these things really come out of frustration, if I'm honest. I mean, with the, with the, with the gloves, it was like frustration of not being able to just be in the moment and stop having to go back to a point and be more like a machine. Um, so this is all, all these projects are about how to give me more time to be an expressive human. I don't want to sit around and like send my biography to 50 people over the course of a year or I don't want to like try and find that IPN number for somebody to credit me on a PPL. You know, I just don't want to have to do that. Um, but if I can find a way to put all this information up there so that any human or machine. Whenever they need this information, that's never going to change, that's not risky in any way to share that information. But it's kind of stuff that's around specifically my creative, uh, self and my business self. So, in time, it will help me clean up credits about myself, it will help me be able to find money where money's been lost because I haven't been credited for this particular thing or they've spelt that song wrong in Sweden or there wasn't a collection society in Libya. So, you know, there's like all kinds of ways that this essential missing A connective point, really. It's about being a digital, 24 7 connected point for the music maker to aid them into dealing with an ever more fragmented world on their own terms. So, I mean, it's a long winded way of saying that there's no way, there's no kind of verified database of musical works that is completely Um, there's lots of fragmented bits. You know, you've got Discogs, you've got loads of, you've got loads of great things, but they're not verified. You know, they're, they're kind of pulled together by fans or music lovers. They're, they're not verified and correct. You couldn't, like, do a bank transfer on. You don't know who the splits are, for example. And they might be wrongly crediting a saxophonist. Um, but by giving us, empowering us, digitally, with our data, to be able to, A, verify that I am Imogen Heap, for starters, connect me to my PPL account, connect me to my PRS account, You know, in the future, in the not so distant future, it might connect to a service that has digitized all of my label contracts in the past so that they would be able to automatically tell the PPL when a license has run out with a label, say for Sony in a couple of years, for example, all of my rights come back to me from Speak for Yourself and Ellipse and Sparks, and therefore they can make the payments directly to me. It's there to simplify our lives. It's there to prepare the music maker for the future. It's there so that we can be one step ahead of technology and be prepared to be integrated with, to share APIs with the Spotify's of the future. What it will do is if we can convince millions of music makers around the world. This is a non profit by the way. It just, it has to be non profit. Music makers basically need to have no excuse not to do this, because this is the only way that we're going to shift the music industry around so it works in our favour. If we become the organised mass of data keepers, of good data, at the moment the organised data sits within the labels and the publishers, so that's why. Most of the services favor the labels and the services because they can barter and do deals around what they hold even though it's our data individually, but they are the keepers of that data. If we soon can be also part of that game and hold the data about our, our license works, um, our credits, our correct biography, our inspirations. Just so many things can happen, but we just first of all need to do this first step. Sign up, log in, put your information up there, get your public page set up. This will just show people. what kind of information we have to share. And the minute you see that brands, TV shows, directors, other collaborators, just so many people, services, music services, streaming services, radio, everyone is going to be like. This is like magic gold dust we didn't even know was there. And we're going to shift it around so it starts to work in our favour. People start to develop for us because we're the larger mass. What we'll see, I believe, is hundreds of thousands of services so that we can create our own little micro ecosystems. So, it is exciting times. It's early days. We just launched it December. And we've got like a thousand users. But when you start to look at their public pages on the map, you can go to map. creativepassport. net and you can start to see people's information. And, um, and, and watch the videos on YouTube. Just, just scroll down to the bottom of creativepassport. net, click YouTube, and watch the link of the 10 minute explainer video. And soon there's going to be a couple minute explainer video. It's going to change things. We just have to show up. You have to show up, Cara. You have to get your own creative passport. I do, actually, I think even Sound On Sound might be in there from Sound On Sound. My interview that I wanted to share, because it's one of the best interviews that I, that I've seen of mine, very in depth studio from like 10 years ago. And actually you'll probably see that on a lot of creative passports. You'll see, you know, a lot of people choosing to put sound on sound interviews there because they're so great. So you might start to see all kinds of benefits from publicity. Yeah. Fab. Wow. There we go. Loads going on. Fantastic. And yeah, love how you're forging forwards at the frontiers of what's possible. Thank you for your time today and all the best with your wonderful projects. Thank you. Thank you for listening and be sure to check out the show notes for further information and details about other episodes in the electronic music series. And before you go. Let me point you to soundonsound. com forward slash podcasts, where you can explore what's on our other channels. This has been a Akari C production for Sound On Sound.