Imogen Heap

Imogen Heap (born 1977) is an English singer, songwriter, and inveterate music technologist — the voice of “Hide and Seek,” half of Frou Frou, a Grammy winner, and the inventor of the gesture-controlled MiMu gloves. She spent the 2010s pushing blockchain fixes for music’s broken data with her Mycelia project, so her AI turn is the continuation of a long crusade, not a pivot.

ai.Mogen and Auracles

Rather than wait for startups to clone her, Heap built her own: ai.Mogen, an AI voice and persona trained on her data, which began as a chatbot to help her cope with correspondence and grew into a creative collaborator — credited as a featured voice on her 2025 single “Aftercare.” She told MusicTech the project began because she “had no control over the whole thing” when AI companies came knocking, so she made a model she owns outright.

The systemic half of her answer is Auracles, a nonprofit “digital ID for music makers” launched in 2024: a registry where artists attach permissions and conditions to their work so AI companies can license it properly. “Everything about ChatGPT is based on human work but none of that is recognised,” she told AFP. “If we become detached from our work… it’s literally going to be AI against us. We need to build in the system what we believe.”

Heap’s stance is deliberately double-edged — “harness the now,” as she puts it: genuine excitement about AI enabling music humans never imagined, wired to hard infrastructure for consent and payment, in the same artist-owned spirit as Holly Herndon’s Spawning.