Imogen Heap and Her Wonderful Gloves

Posted on | July 22, 2011 | 2 Comments

As Imogen Heap adds to her collection of musical resources over the years, little performative gems pop into existence for the public to see and enjoy. Her inventive works include the use of unusual or new instruments such as the increasingly popular Keytar and the curious Eigenharp, inventive styles of live performance including the events involved for Live4Pakistan and even (especially in this case) new performative technology.

Here she creates a whole ‘heap’ of creative sounds in a wonderful performance using some of her familiar instruments and vocal stylings, but the magic in her performance this time is simply down to the movement of her hands. In the following video, one moment shows Heap reaching out and pulling the music away from the audience, only to throw it back to them moments later in such an effective fashion that one could use the term ‘literally’.

This performance harnesses a piece of technology not unfamiliar to the technological market (not unfamiliar by a long shot) but for it to be used to deliver musical content of this complexity is a fresh approach and clearly a great achievement indeed, more so than the technology used in the gloves themselves. To associate hand gestures to music or audio processing while retaining the clarity of gesture>sound relationship is a hard thing to do, yet watching her performance here at ‘Wired’s Future Of Music’ you can’t help but to see that it makes sense and although some of this is down to keeping some gestures simple such as triggering drum samples with the flick of a hand others would require some deeper thought as more than one gesture would make sense for a musical function.

The following is taken from http://productionadvice.co.uk/:

In this clip she: high-pass filters audio by “cupping” the audio in her hands; builds “air drum” loops from scratch; controls volume, reverb and panning by “conducting” and even uses some kind of time-scrunch/scratching processing towards the end….We don’t see the wires, accelerometers, gyroscopes and magnetometers working – we see a tangible, involving performance where the gloves and Immi’s movements have a real physical connection to what we are hearing – just like watching someone play a “normal” musical instrument.

The gloves themselves boast a wide range of electronic components from gyroscopes, sensors and accelerometers to the very clever inclusion of radio microphones located at the wrists. These prove useful not just for vocal audio looping but instrument looping and processing too, all the while leaving Heap free from wires with the ability to express her music in a very spiritual and captivating fashion linking body movement to melody, rhythm and timbre. This concept has shown presence in thousands of years of performing arts, portrayed and represented through body language and movement and it is now a phenomenon that is successfully being realised in reality through the use of modern technology.

Peace.

- Leigh Davies.

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2 Responses to “Imogen Heap and Her Wonderful Gloves”

Kai Lena
July 23rd, 2011 @ 13:06

totally stunning..can’t help but feel a little jealous she’s got there first tbh!
Leigh Davies
July 26th, 2011 @ 20:45

Tell me about it Kai! Such an amazing project. What’s even more frustrating is this was Miles’ original CSM5 project until he ran out of time…