Instant Genius - Could these gloves be the future of music?

Episode Date: August 22, 2018

Imogen Heap has pushed the creative boundaries in the creation of electronic music, but now she is using technology a different way that she hopes will create a fairer and more inclusive future for musicians. She talks to us about how blockchain could revolutionise the music industry, and how her innovative mi.mu gloves are changing the way we create and perform electronic music. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I mean, I still use keyboards and I still play a computer instruments, but I augment them and I might add a huge reverb to my voice. And instead of using a slider to do that, I can just raise my arm. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast.

I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Focus magazine. Humans have been creating instrumental music for as long as 40,000 years, but it's pioneers like Delia Derbyshire, who created the iconic Doctor Who theme in the middle of the 20th century, that has seen us move away from the traditional instruments of the past to digital electronic sounds that we're so familiar with today. Image and heap is one such musician. Her electronic pop has seen her climb the charts around the world,

and collaborate with countless artists rarely off our airwaves. But not content with just accepting the instruments and tools that we have at our disposal, she wants to change the way we write songs and build a future that is more equitable and inclusive to everybody who wants to create music. She speaks to online editor Alexander McNamara, ahead of her talk at FutureFest, about how blockchain could revolutionise the music industry and why her innovative Mimu gloves are changing the way we create and perform electronic music.

So you are obviously Imogen Heap and you've been doing music for quite a long time. And it's pretty technologically awesome, if I'm made. But how did you start creating music using technology? Well, I've always created music with technology because, you know, technology at different points in time, there's always come in different forms. And even, you know, the piano is a piece of technology, was the height of its technology back in the day. And so that's where I began, I suppose, my interaction with technology when I was a little girl.

And even didn't really dawn on me so much later, but essentially inside the piano, we had a thing called a pianola or a piano player where it reads a role and you have little, you know, holes inside the roll and the wind goes through them and the, or it sucks out the wind. And then you have the notes go down on the keyboard. and that's essentially code in music. So at a very early stage, I kind of grasped this idea that didn't have to be playing music to make it happen. You could use a thing that would read music indifferently.

And then at the age of 12, I discovered an Atari computer, which had some early sequencing software on it. And that really excited me because I didn't have to write stuff down on manuscript. I could just type it in and I would have different layers of sounds. And that was about 28 years ago. And so from there, yeah, just learnt about sound recording and just every time I just felt like I reached a point with the technology where it wasn't doing what I wanted or I'd explored as much as I felt it could do,

then I started to look elsewhere for inspiration. And then in some cases it started to develop the technology myself because there wasn't anything I could buy that did what I wanted it to do. And that's where I went into making the Mimi Gloves, which were essentially just a passion project to enable me to. enable me to create music on the move and be able to reach inside my computer without having to connect via a keyboard and a mouse. I'll push buttons when I wanted to do something like capture my voice and move it around the room. I could do it gesturally.

And so that, it's just a slow progression, but always a nice dance with technology. Yeah, I mean, it's everyone, everyone interfaces with technology. I'm talking to you on a phone. The sort of tech that you've used has definitely changed over time. And as you say, you mentioned your Mimu gloves. How does that compare to something that you were using on your first album? Well, my first album was, yeah, we recorded on a tape-to-ta-tape, so a 24-inch track recorder.

We had a mixing desk, an analogue mixing desk, so it didn't remember moves. You had to move it manually. and yeah so that all the kind of processing in terms of how you got sound in and how you augmented that sound or changed that sound was all done through analogue equipment so if you wanted to compress something or if you wanted to add a reverb you had to do it through a mechanical way and or record it in a room but now you can just you know digitally recreate electronically recreate that effect inside what's called a plugin so you can have a music

system like that would have cost me and did cost, I needed a record deal in order to make an album back in the day because you needed to access these huge pieces of equipment in order to get music down onto a CD, you know, and all the processing around that. But now all of that's disappeared. You can just, you know, create music in a box inside your laptop and you can distribute it on the internet and you just don't need any of that kit. So it means everyone and anyone can basically do what I would have access to pretty much that same stuff that I would have needed a record deal to do and a big label to do and I would have to give them a large piece of my, you know, my IP as a result of that, whereas now it's very fluid and I think the problem that we now have

is just so much noise, so many, so much music with no release solution. I mean, we're getting better at discovery, curation of data and discovery, you know, with algorithms and people, you know, curating more and more. But it's an incredible amount of music that's being uploaded every second of every day and systems are finding it hard to cope which has led me to my next my next project which is to help discovery of artists and you know different revenue streams for artists outside of you know the tiny amounts that streaming can bring and that project to help discovery of artists is that your what what's that project how are we going to do that well so for three and a half years i've been basically following one

conversation I had with a friend of mine called Zoe Keating when I was introduced to this technology called blockchain technology. And it really inspired me to think of the music industry I wanted to exist. I started to blue sky imagine what I felt was missing and how we could help solve those problems. And it really comes down to we're needing an open database of songs so that all of the music industry and all the services can interface with a collective database of songs so that you can access the stuff that you need to know about a musician, how to pay a musician, who has the splits, etc, etc, because at the moment we have siloed databases, which makes it very hard for services to innovate and it makes it, you know, very hard for musicians to know how their money

got to them if they get on E at all, who took a cut along the way, and it's often, you know, well, it is extremely fragmented and very inefficient. So I started to imagine a set of, a data set of songs and the data set of music makers. And upon that ground layer, if we could, if we can envision that, if we could bring that to life, then the music industry can truly flourish because it has this kind of core protocol and data layer to grow from. And so yeah, we call that creative passport. So I'm not going to deal with the songs database bit because that's, you know, that's a big,

that's a big one. But on an individual level, every music maker can create themselves an identity and, you know, put their flag in the sand and be open for business, data empowered, sharing their skillsets and their projects, connecting to their works on a database or existing databases, becoming a beacon of their data to help generate better collaboration in business and creative collaboration, unearthing all of the unseen music makers around the world, and making them discoverable by a machine or human. So we call them the creative passport, and that's why I'm here today,

at FutureFest showcasing this idea for a vision of a music industry. In September, we're going to have a basic app which music makers can peer-to-peer verify one another. So if you were a music maker, I don't know if you are, maybe you are in your spare time. You might play the guitar or you might write the odd lyric. And if I had probably met you, and I assume you are who you are, I can verify you if we've met together today and verify your music, make a creative passport, and then you can then go and verify your friends and they can go and verify their friends. And we start to create a very powerful

ground layer for the music industry. Once they start to see, once we start to become visible of how many hundreds of thousands and potentially millions we are all around the world, into places where the music industry doesn't even touch, you know, or isn't even really connected to like, you know, 50% of Africa, where there is no revenue streams for music makers at all. So by building this ground layer, we can truly connect and make a truly global music industry and a community that we can, where people start to come to us directly, and we can start to shape our own future by just being extremely useful to the music ecosystem. And it's blockchain, that is, that verification that's in there, that's, that's, that's

leading everyone to say, okay, I'm working with you, and then everyone, you worked with, that's verifying it all across the board? The system is verifying, yes. So the information around who you are, what you do, your skillsets, that that's not going to be sitting in the blockchain, but that kind of, yes, I verified this person, this person verified this person, and the hashing of that history goes into the blockchain. But actually, a lot of the stuff I'm talking about doesn't go anywhere near the blockchain. And currently that will be a centralized database because decentralising will involve a lot more collaboration,

a lot more development and a lot more money. So at this stage, we're just doing what we can see in the headlights, and we're just enabling people to connect to one another, and we're going to visualize that on a map so people can start to see how big many we are. And then from that, just do what we can see in the headlights as and when technology becomes available for us to, to move that into the decentralized space

and to look at governance, to look to inspiration in nature, actually how nature thinks about, I don't really think about it, but how it does govern itself and a sustainable look to nature for inspiration into how to develop this system. Because ultimately I don't want to have myself

on a board of people being like the directors of the board of my Celia Creative Passport. We want it to be open, decentralized and for pockets of music makers to help govern and help lead areas of the technology and the move forwards by being empowered to be able to make those changes within their own system.

So it's sort of like a network of the musicians and the other people that do all the creatives around it. Is it just at the moment, you're obviously a musician, but is it limited to just people who create music or is it to others as well who could create other form of the arts like paintings or literature or anything like that. Yeah, I mean, in time, you know, hopefully this can create some kind of precedent for,

to show, you know, what we believe is that kind of a great, you know, huge amount of innovation can flourish from this and money can better flow to encourage other industries where there is equal or worse fragmentation, such as the film industry, to create that connective tissue for the film directors and the actors. you know, the script writers and all these people, so that, you know, it can show precedent for this is going to help your industry. It's not going to, it's not going to do you out of a job. It's going to augment your industry by adding this missing layer. It's going to be better for all.

So, but what we're going to do is just start with what we can do, because I'm a music maker, I'm just going to start here. But if other people want to, like, you know, take our technology, it's open source and develop that for their own arts sector in the arts. Brilliant. I mean, I've also, you know, we developed these. mean your gloves and a lot of people see obviously kind of relevance in how it might work in say, you know, graphics or architecture or designing a building.

You could do that gesturally or all kinds of things that you could do with a pair of gloves that are data, you know, data gloves with the incredible kind of flexibility and low latency or no latency that the gloves have. So, but we're just doing what we know, which is the music side and really make that just shine and then see you know but we've got to do what we can do first yeah um i just want to go back to those um gloves again because you're saying that they're very sort of gesture and uh could help create things how is it that they actually work how how if you'd be able to sort of just explain what you can do with the gloves that'd be awesome yeah well um i'll speak as if somebody has no idea about any music making

software. So currently a musician will go into a studio and they'll record an instrument. That could be a guitar. That could be their voice, but it could equally be a synthesizer. It could be a digital, you know, electronic instrument which doesn't have like, it'll probably be limited to a keyboard and interface with other sounds that aren't acoustic instruments. So, or even if you're playing a stringed instrument, you're pretty much limited to a keyboard to play that stringed instrument. There's another keyboard called Roli, which you can, you know, have different parameters. Like you might want to add vibrato with an extra press of, a harder press of your finger, or you could actually make that vibrato on a string, but on a keyboard.

But you're tied down to one place. And you're limiting your whole body to just what your hands can do in a position at a keyboard. And say you wanted to make a sound that kind of sounds like, weo-w-wow. How do you do that in one? you know, using a keyboard where you've just got like black and white notes and maybe a button or a pan or a pot. I don't know what the word is. Oh, God.

Anyway, not a switch, but like a turning knob thing. A knob. So, but then your whole, one whole hand is consumed by turning that knob to make something go. So with the gloves, you have your, you have up, down, left, right. you have pitch, which is like moving your hand up and down. You've got your, which is moving your hand left and right. And then you've got roll, which is like twisting your hand. They've got all of these different parameters that you can use at any one time.

And you've also got directions, front back, up, right, down, left, right. And then you've also got accelerometer peak. So when you, you know, hit a peak, then a drum trigger could trigger, for example. Or you might want to fade between two different sounds as your hand goes up and down or so many possibilities. And then combined with that, the gloves, essentially, you teach your gloves what gestures you want to use, what postures you want to use. So I have one finger, open hand, fist, you know, T finger, what I call T finger, secret finger, lots of different with, and nine or so different postures. And that combined with the accelerometer data and the positional data, you can create a huge opportunity for mapping, which is greatly different and the media and express. than working with current off-the-shelf equipment.

I mean, I've watched a video of you using it, and it's just incredible to think that as you're moving around, you're creating these sounds, and it's all happening there and then. It seems like it's very organic, as compared to a lot of electronic instruments, which, as you say, they seem quite defined already. Yeah, you are expressive.

You're in the moment. You're being spontaneous. You're being able to, shape sound on the move. You're not being disengaged from your audience because it's part of your flow. You don't have a barricade of gear around you. I mean, I still use keyboards

and I still play the piano and I still play a concert instrument, but I augment them. And I might add a huge reverb to my voice. And instead of using a slider to do that, I can just raise my arm in the sky, you know, raise it up. And then you hear this big, cavernous reverb start to emerge. Or I might put my hand to my mouth and close by fist

and that will capture that particular sound and I could create a loop with that and I could move it around the stereo or the surround field. So there's so many. The only thing about the gloves in my opinion is that you can get completely lost in all the possibilities

and it really takes another skill that we currently, you know, it's that kind of, you can get lost in the possibilities and you sometimes have to create boundaries within your performance, within your songwriting to stop you from going down too many wormholes of possibilities that you currently don't have previous to that.

When you say you were talking about the Atari earlier on, it's just I remember many years ago playing on the Atari just going, there are so much information here, there's so much happening. And that's happened quite a lot. I've tried to make electronic particularly unsuccessfully over the years. But I often found that it is that barrier is just so much information that is coming in. How will these gloves be used for just, you know, is it just going to be like really experienced electronic music pros?

Or will it be open to people who are, you know, like me, less capable? Well, in terms of there will always be the, you know, they don't have a sound engine. you would need to connect it to a music software such as Ableton or program a bit with Max MSP or to make the sounds that you want to make. It doesn't just magically, you know, make sounds for you or create a song for you. It's really a kind of interface between your existing technology that you use and being able to get closer to the performative and the creative side

without, with just your body, more intuitive. but at the moment there is a learning, you know, you will have to learn if you don't know how to use Ableton. But in the future, you know, we're just kind of self-funded group at the moment, but we do hope to go live with a manufacturerable glove by the end of the year maybe. And so who knows when that possibility happens, what we can then start to develop. But currently, yeah, you do have to be at a certain level of knowledge to be able to use the gloves. But having said that, we have developed a little glove, called the Mini Mew, which is going to be on the shelves, hopefully, in September.

And this is a glove that you can build and code yourself. And it's really generated kind of focusing towards kids. But it can be their first foray into music and technology. And we're really quite excited about that. And that's a very simple, you know. But with that, you can then connect to our software called Glover. So you can actually use professional, Systems like Ableton or Pro Tools or maybe not Pro Tools is a bit difficult because it's a mapping is not so good.

But for live software like Ableton, it's really amazing. You can just get up and running in no time. You know, even with these, the mini-mead gloves can do pretty cool things. So in short, there is a bit of a learning curve because unless you know the software that's out there, you know, you're going to find it even harder to then figure out what you actually want to do with the gloves. Because off the shelf, they won't suddenly start making noises. but after a year or so we might get to that point where we develop a sound engine and it is all kind of in the box as it were.

It sounds cool. I like the idea of just small people with these little gloves making wacky music and all that sort of thing. You know, I've seen small people hit at pianos and go, that's really cool. I like what the sound is, but just given this technology, how far can we take it to get people, you know, especially young people and children and just really sort of taking music to a different level. Very quickly.

Yeah, in about three hours of a workshop, by the end of it, they've built and coded the gloves. And they've just like, wow, I didn't realize that I could do that. And then they're like looking forward to the next thing. Yeah. I guess it's kind of inspirational for you as a musician to see this happening. It is extremely. And we have 40 what we call glovers at the moment.

And they're users in, you know, actually in great. graphics as well and robotics. But other performers, like there's a girl called Chagal, C-H-A-G-A-L, if you want to check her music out. She does loads of glove music and performs, you know, quite a lot in London and around a Dutch artist. And she, you know, I get really inspired by how she works with the gloves. But actually my greatest inspiration in terms of the users that we have is a guy called

Chris Helping. And he, he, we met him through an organisation called the organisation called the Drake Foundation, and they work with musicians with disabilities through tech. And they bought a pair of mini gloves, and Chris Halpin has been playing with them, writing with them, performing with them. He's got cerebral palsy, and his condition got so much worse over a period of time that he wasn't able to play the guitar chords that he wanted to play live anymore. And he kind of thought his days were numbered in terms of his music career,

but actually they've really flourished since he's been working with the gloves because they're customizable to the users. So if on one day he's feeling, you know, less flexible or able than another day, then his gloves can help him counteract that and he can retrain his gloves. And he's taught us so much in terms of what our software can do. And he's a really huge inspiration. And his music is, you know, he plays basically. He can, he does loads of things.

But one of the things he does was create really like heavy rock guitar with these gloves. and it's just amazing to see. That's like seeing heavy rock is just one thing that you just don't associate with electronic instruments as it were. You know, it must be pretty diverse that sort of things that you can create with it, if that's the case. Yeah, I mean, just even for me,

for the last six or seven years, been working with that understanding of space and time and posture, gesture. It makes me think about music differently, It makes me think about what I'm capable of. It actually helps me to simplify my work because with so little you can do so much and be so effective. Whereas in the past I might layer, you know, tons and tons of instruments live

to try to create that, try to create something that's closer to the experience that I might do in the studio, the very layered effect. So, you know, lots of loops, lots of effects. But it would always be changed to my laptop. But now I feel very comfortable, you know, actually much less because I can have such exploration in one sound and in the manipulation around that sound, the creativity around that sound, with just a pair of gloves and my voice.

So it has changed the way I think about creating creativity and performance. Usually for me, so I imagine it will for others. It does for others. Do you think this will sort of be the future of music or will we still have like, I mean, we've been playing guitars and pianos and pianos for a long time. guitars 50 years or 60 years or so you know never 50 years time are we going to ditch stringed instruments and just be all working your hands around i really hope not no i mean this isn't something to replace you know the stuff which is great and beautiful and it's not to put it's not in any way to um take place of those acoustic and you know incredibly skilled musicians that play

those instruments it's you could imagine a violinist playing the playing the violin but augmenting their sound by live looping and creating effects as the, you know, how they move around the stage. They might go into one side of the stage and it might start to harmonise over themselves or they might start to walk over this side of the stage and create, you know, a weird effect or a distortion effect without taking them out of the flow of the performance. So I think it's more like an extra layer of expression rather than an alternative to a music instrument. It's more kind of adaptation than it's more. It's not generating sound itself.

That was musician Imogen Heap, talking to us ahead of her talk at this year's Future Fest. If you want to listen to her talk or watch some more of the incredible performances by musicians using the Mimu gloves, visit ScienceFocus.com today. And don't forget to rate and subscribe to the Science Focus podcast on your favourite podcast player. Thanks for listening to the Science Focus podcast.

The September issue of BBC Focus magazine is out this week. In it, we look at the future of food from how farming is preparing for population growth and climate change as well as what we'll be eating in 2028 and we also delve deep into the minds of psychopaths, uncover crimes using DNA ancestry kits and ask why people believe conspiracy theories that fly in the face of scientific evidence.

As always, there's much, much more inside. Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com. We'll look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by Name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic

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