Musician Imogen Heap Is Offering AI-Powered ‘Songs as a Service’

By Stephen Graves

Grammy-award-winning musician Imogen Heap has teamed up with “ethically-trained” AI music platform Jen to launch a pair of AI models based on her music and voice.

StyleFilter is an AI tool trained, with Heap’s permission, on her new singles  “What Have You Done To Me” and “Last Night of an Empire.” The tool enables users to apply Heap’s unique stylings to their own music based on AI prompts, using a dial to determine how much of her “vibe” ends up in the final composition.

“I wanted to enable the fans to come in and generate a piece of music based on my piece of music,” Heap said in an on-stage discussion at Web Summit in Lisbon, describing the end product as “an actual working song as a service.”

Heap and Jen have also announced an AI voice model trained on the musician’s own vocals. Jen claims to have “set a new standard for copyright compliance in generative AI music,” with its AI models trained on material licensed from the original artists.

Speaking on stage at Web Summit, Heap said that she initially struggled to find “a generative music platform that was ethically sourcing permissioned musical works to generate music from,” before alighting on Jen.

The AI platform uses blockchain as part of its compliance model. Each new track generates a timestamped cryptographic hash as it’s created, which is then logged on The Root Network’s blockchain, “ensuring the integrity and timestamp of each track's creation,” the company said in a press release.

“The landscape is different now,” Heap said, adding that, “We have blockchain, we have distributed technologies, we have social media, we have huge amounts of connections and discussions, and we never had that before.” That, she argued, gives musicians an opportunity to “build this layer and to then empower ourselves to create this database of works.”

Heap is something of an early adopter of new technologies, having previously developed motion-tracking gloves for making music, as well as the blockchain-powered Creative Passport digital ID service for musicians. More recently, she’s created a biographical AI, Mogen, trained on her interviews and speeches, which she ultimately hopes to use as a collaborator for live performances.

On stage at Web Summit, Heap speculated about the possibility of creating an “AI companion that has learned from me, has learned from my works,” and evolving it into a “base model” created collectively with other musicians. “If we can just create these base pieces,” she said, “then we can build anything from it in an ethical, wholesome and exciting, creative way.”

Edited by Stacy Elliott.

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