British musician and pop vocalist, Imogen Heap (b. 1977), presents a markedly different approach to electronic vocal music when compared to Stevie Wonder. Unlike Wonder, however, very little extant information about Heap exists. Her album catalog is also relatively small. This is not to suggest that is her music insignificant, however. On the contrary, Heap’s music has gained wide exposure in various films and television shows. It has been sampled by other performers (presumably, with her permission): most notably by hip-hop artist Jason Derulo in his 2010 hit song “Watcha Say.” (Ironically, this song also uses artificial vocality through Auto Tune). [1]
According to musicologist Alexa Woloshyn, Heap had developed an inkling for technology while still in her youth. Yet, this fascination occurred quite by accident. As Woloshyn states:
…. Her first significant opportunity to experiment with electronic music technology was at the private boarding school she attended as a young teenager. Heap clashed with her music teacher, who punished her by sending her alone to a small room. Left in the room with an Atari computer, with Mac Classic 2 and Notator, and the large manual, Heap began to experiment and gained an interest in building her own studio …. She formalized her training in production at the BRIT school of Performing Arts & Technology in Croyden, Surrey, from 1992 until 1995.[2]
Interestingly, Heap’s debut album entitled I Megaphone (1998) represents a stark contrast to her later, electronically infused albums from the 2000s. For one, the tracks are representative of Alternative or Grunge.[3] Her transition partially stems from her work with Guy Sigworth in the short-lived duo known as Frou Frou. Although the two released only one album together (Details from 2002), their music suddenly acquired popularity after being featured in the 2004 film, Garden State. Despite the fact that Sigsworth did not achieve the same artistic success as Heap, she still acknowledged his contribution to shaping her career.[4]
Artificial vocality plays a very significant role in Imogen Heap’s 2005 release, Speak for Yourself. The twelve tracks that comprise this album concentrate specifically on diverse emotional aspects of love: uncertainty, confusion, anger, etc. Yet, it is through Heap’s astute knowledge of music technology that Speak for Yourself becomes more than a mere compilation of original love songs. It is this attribute that leads Woloshyn to suggest the cyborg-like qualities of Heap’s music.[5]
From a social context, the perception of the cyborgs and robots has often carried dystopian notions of fear (primarily the fear of self-inflicted enslavement by constantly-evolving technology.) This sense of paranoia and “unnaturalness” has also been applied to studies of popular music, as the research by musicologists Joseph Auner[6] and Freya Jarman-Ivens[7] can attest. With Heap music, however, it adds another layer of creativity.
Such is the case with the fifth track on Speak for Yourself called, “Hide and Seek.” The song can make for an intriguing, if at times jarring, experience upon listening to it for the first time. It is the kind of song that requires in-depth listening because Heap utilizes complex vocal harmonies throughout (In order to accurately catch harmonic timbres and panning effects of the song, it is beneficial to hear it through headphones.) “Hide and Seek” is also unusual because, unlike the other eleven tracks on the album, this song consists solely of Heap’s voice—or, rather, a “robotic” version of it.[8] This leads some to wonder if she uses a vocoder throughout the song.
Surprisingly, Heap does not use the device for “Hide and Seek” at all. According to Alexa Woloshyn, the various “voices” heard in the track along with Heap originated from a plug-in harmonizer pedal. Woloshyn explains the reason behind the sudden musical deviation on Speak for Yourself:
…. Her new computer was malfunctioning due to a faulty power supply. This halted her work, but she decided not to leave her studio without any work done. So she picked up her harmonizer, plugged it into her keyboard via MIDI and recorded it on her eight-track mini-disc recorder. As she sang into the microphone and played notes on the keyboard, the harmonizer took that vocal input and shifted it to the other pitches depressed on the keyboard.… [9]
Based on this information, one can see how Heap managed to turn a mistake into a success. Woloshyn also mentions that “Hide and Seek” had been featured in the primetime television drama The O.C. [10] Another clue that eliminates the possibility of the vocoder in the songs stems from the clarity of Heap’s voice (because the pedal she is using creates harmonies around her voice instead of directly synthesizing it).[11]
Given the process of the song, the poetic (or poetically abstract) lyrics to “Hide and Seek” make some sense. The opening lines of “Where are we? / What the hell is going on?” (0:00-0:13)[12] complement the surreal robotic atmosphere of Heap’s artificial vocality in the song. Because Speak for Yourself focuses on themes of love (usually, love gone wrong), this song could be heard another way: as a “break-up song.” The unidentified protagonist of the song exhibits moments of denial and confusion, as is evident towards the end of the song: “Speak, no, feeling, no/ I don’t believe you. / You don’t care a bit./ You don’t care a bit.” (3:32-3:40).[13] Even though “Hide and Seek” is sung by a female, the gender ambiguity of the lyrics could possibly make the song accessible to male listeners as well.
Footnotes
[1] Jason Derulo. Jason Derulo, Warner Bros. Records Inc., 2010, CD. Tr. 1.
[2] Woloshyn, Alexa. “Imogen Heap As Musical Cyborg: Renegotiations of Power, Gender, and Sound.” Journal on the Art of Record Production, Issue 4 (October 2009), 1-10
[3] Heap, Imogen, I Megaphone. Almo Sounds Ltd., 1998. CD.
[4] Alexa Woloshyn, “Imogen Heap As Musical Cyborg: Renegotiations of Power, Gender, and Sound.” Journal on the Art of Record Production, Issue 4 (October 2009), 1-10.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Joseph Auner, “‘Sing it for Me’: Posthuman Ventriloquism in Recent Popular Music,” Journal of the Royal Music Association, Vol. 128 (1), 2003: 98-122. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3557466 (accessed March 29, 2014).
[7] Freya Jarman-Ivens, “Chapter 3: Karen Carpenter: America’s Most Defiant Square,” in Queer Voices: Technologies, Vocalities, and the Musical Flaw (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 59-93.
[8] Imogen Heap, Speak for Yourself, Megaphonic Records, 2005. CD.
[9] Alexa Woloshyn, “Imogen Heap As Musical Cyborg: Renegotiations of Power, Gender, and Sound.” Journal on the Art of Record Production, Issue 4 (October 2009), 1-10.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Imogen Heap, Speak for Yourself, Megaphonic Records, 2005. CD. Tr. 5.
[12] Ibid.
[13]Ibid.