‘Harness the now’: British singer Imogen Heap embraces AI

LISBON – Unlike the bulk of her peers, Grammy-winning British singer Imogen Heap is embracing the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in her music as well as to set up a music collaboration platform.

“I am excited about AI because I feel maybe it can help humans harness the now,” she said on the sidelines of the four-day Web Summit tech conference in Lisbon, which wrapped up on Nov 14.

The two-time Grammy winner recorded the conversation, as she does with all her interactions with journalists, to feed into her own generative intelligence model called Mogen, which was originally created to interact with her fans.

“It’s about empowering a chatbot, basically with a knowledge store, to be able to answer on behalf of me, so that I can get on with being human,” said Heap.

The 46-year-old singer is best known for her 2005 song, Hide And Seek, that first gained popularity after it was featured in a scene in popular teen drama series The O.C. (2003 to 2007).

Heap has used Mogen to create the final part of her new song called What Have You Done To Me that was unveiled earlier in November.

“It is interesting because the beginning of the song is done very traditionally in the studio, chopped up and everything like that and in a way sounds less human than the AI voice, which sounds bizarrely more human,” she said.

AI production assistant

Heap would eventually like to create music with the help of Mogen live at a concert or in the studio, with the AI playing the role of production and composition assistant.

“It’s like a huge sea of tagged audio and words so that in the future, I can walk into my living room or barn and create music in real time based on ideas I’ve previously had that can be fed into the system in real time,” she said.

The singer also previewed a platform at the Web Summit called Auracles, which features tracks along with their certified data, such as the authorisations and conditions stipulated by the musicians for the reuse of their work.

Users will have to pay to be able to remix and sample the sounds using AI, with a third of the revenue going to a climate protection association.

Many artistes around the world complain that their music is being fed into generative AI algorithms without their permission and then used to create new music.

American music industry trade group Recording Industry Association of America filed a lawsuit in June against AI start-ups Suno and Udio, accusing them of having copied “the work of an artiste and exploit it for their own benefit without consent or remuneration”.

Stop the steal

Heap is also working with start-up Jen, a platform for generating music using AI which advocates respect for copyright.

On the Auracles website, which will be officially launched in December, users can use the Jen service to create tracks with AI in the style of Heap.

“Everything about ChatGPT is based on human work, but none of that is recognised,” she said.

“If we become detached from our work and we don’t value in any way, it’s going to be AI against us.

“We need to build in the system what we believe. We have value, we have ideas. So this is what we’re doing with Auracles,” she added. AFP