I know it’s kinda old news, but for those of you who didn’t know, Imogen Heap is awesome. Besides innovating live music performance and helping establish the image of the live solo artist (as in being alone on stage and making all the music yourself – also check out Laurie Anderson while you’re at it), she’s been an inspiration to a whole generation of live electronic music performers (read: controllerists) and music technologists worldwide, myself included. She’s been cited as a major influence by almost everyone, from small independent artists like Rheyne to rulers of beats like Beardyman.

Yes, I got a bit carried away with praise. Anyway, the main piece of info here is that for the past two years, she’s been working on a system to create music using primarily hand gestures (something she lovingly calls her “magical musical gloves” – read the full story here). While she did tease some of the press and fans with news about the gloves, there hasn’t exactly been a wealth of videos demonstrating their development or use for those of us who couldn’t make it to TedGlobal2012 in person to see her (read: everyone except for about 850 delegates). The good news is that she’s recently done a talk for Wired about them (look up), and she goes into detail about how and why they were made, as well as how they work, all leading up to a beautiful performance at the end, of a song she’s written with the gloves.

Imogen Heap at Ted Global 2012. Image courtesy of the BBC

While gestural music performance is not entirely a new concept, with Onyx Ashanti having developed a relatively similar system way earlier and the likes of Ethno Tekh using Kinekt to perform (as well as countless others), Imogen Heap’s approach is a sign of the ever expanding accessibility of this type of technology, as well as an inspiration to all musicians thinking about developing their own unique system to perform (by the way, we’re anxiously awaiting Beardyman’s TED talk, tomorrow, about his new performance system).

Viva DIY!