This is a guest post by writer Andy Meek. This story was updated with a comment from Imogen Heap. 

Imogen Heap, the statuesque singer-songwriter who scored a massive hit on her own with the a cappella “Hide and Seek,” is a gadget and technology super-fan.

The Grammy-winning artist constantly is advocating for, supporting and even helping develop new tech toys that serve all manner of purposes, from connecting her more closely to her fans, to elevating her own music to simply using tech to perform music-related tasks.

Those tasks include jogging. At the moment, she’s working with Intel to develop a jogging app. “I love jogging + music but I can’t listen to music when I run,” she tweeted about the so-called “generative” music app. She explained further on her Facebook page, saying that she has been working on and off over the last few months on an application that plays “music that changes according to the intensity of your run, building and growing over the distance, interacting with you and the outside world. The music you hear will never be the same twice yet all threading on musical themes and a feeling that is related to the app.”

As part of the app-in-progress, Heap also has asked fans to send her snippets of cheers and encouragement, because she wants to drop something along those lines into the app to cheer on the user after they’ve reached distances of a certain interval. An assortment of sounds from fans that Heap has collected – the requisite attaboys and you-can-do-its – can be heard at this Soundcloud page.

The effect she’s going for here reminds me of “Scape.” That’s a new app from Brian Eno, the composer and producer who’s worked with acts like U2, Coldplay and Paul Simon. It’s available in the app store now, and it’s a minimalist little gem for which the user touches the tablet screen to create random beeps, dings and pleasant sounds that randomly combine to form incredibly tranquil soundscapes.

Like what Heap is creating, Eno’s app – produced with Peter Chilvers – also is a “generative” music product. An example of it in action:

Heap’s jogging app, meanwhile, is only the latest in a line of tech-fueled endeavors for which the British musician has been getting some big exposure. Another example: outlets like Wired – as well as the TEDGlobal conference in Scotland in 2011 – detailed a pair of high-tech musical gloves Heap unveiled.

Fans and audiences at her shows know that Imogen’s concerts are often part performance, part mixing session. She’s generally alone, and she’ll lay down a percussive track, then run to a different machine and produce some ambient noise, pick up a keyboard and play a few notes, layer her own voice over itself a few times – all mixed live.

It’s a frantic exercise, and she was inspired by gloves at MIT’s music lab which do that work for her. Using hand gestures, arm movements and finger flutters, she can create a wide array of sounds, and the visual effect is akin to watching Imogen serve as her own musical conductor.

“My brain…exploded with possibilities after being inspired by Elly Jessop and her VAMP glove in 2009 during my visit there [to MIT],” Heap told VentureBeat. “I set to developing my own pair with Tom Mitchell from UWE as soon as I got home and we are now a core team of six based in London, Bristol and Berlin.”

Pick up around the 5:30-minute mark to watch her get going:

Learn more about the team that built the gloves here.

Andy Meek is a journalist in Memphis who frequently contributes to outlets including Fast Company, Forbes, Politico, and several tech blogs.

Image credit: University of the West of England

When Oren Jacob was a teenager, he hung up Star Wars posters on his bedroom wall. In his early 20′s at a college dorm at Berkeley, he replaced these with a small jumping desk lamp image, Pixar‘s famous logo.

“So your lifelong interest in digital filmmaking was awakened by a reel of a hopping desk lamp?” I asked. “Pretty much,” he said.

After snagging an internship at Pixar, Jacobs ascended the corporate ladder to be named CTO.  He worked for over twenty years under the distant — but still overbearing — presence of Steve Jobs.

This week, the great pioneers in digital filmmaking have reunited. With the acquisition of Lucasfilm, Disney will squeeze more value out of the 35-year old Star Wars franchise.

George Lucas was a pioneer in the field of video gaming. EditDroid, was developed by a Lucasfilm spin-off company. You’ll find this editing technology in Photoshop, and in the latest crop of video startups.

On an investor call in the days following the announcement, Disney’s CEO Bob Iger alluded to Lucasfilm’s technology contribution: “It is a sustainable source of branded, high-quality creative content with tremendous global appeal that will benefit all of Disney’s business units and is incredibly well suited for new business models, including digital platforms.” Read the full story here.

For this reason, it’s not surprising that the price of over $4 billion for Lucasfilm is larger than any other Disney purchase since Pixar in 2006. In the aftermath of the announcement, I caught up with Jacob for a conversation about the reunion of Lucasfilm and Pixar, two great production houses under the same roof once again.

VentureBeat: What was your reaction to the news of the acquisition?
Oren Jacob: Disney just purchased the world’s greatest visual effects house. Pixar is the best animation house. It’s kind of remarkable. This is a reunion too — Steve Jobs bought the computer graphics division from [George] Lucas back in the 80s.

VentureBeat: You’re a digital filmmaking buff. But the technology goes beyond movies…
Jacob: Lucasfilm has contributed in meaningful ways for decades. You’ll find the origins of nonlinear editing that you’ll see in an app like SocialCam or Vidi reach back to EditDroid (EditDroid is the nonlinear editing technology that was designed to move analog editing methods to digital). Photoshop is a direct descendent, as is Final Cut Pro. From sound protocols to scanning, the shopping list of technology products is very long and deep.

VentureBeat: How will Disney benefit from owning these two great Bay Area studios, cocooned from Hollywood?
Jacob: Lucasfilm offers an absolutely unique set of properties, crew and capabilities. To have that as part of its corporate empire is an awesome acquisition. Yes, people will joke, “Are we going to see R2D2 with a Mickey Mouse hat?” What’s more interesting is that Disney acquired a company with unique technology and really unprecedented production facilities. Lucasgames was a world class gaming studio. As a family of companies, it has fingers in almost every pot of digital entertainment you could imagine. Now they have reunited under the same umbrella, computer graphic techniques and approaches can be shared back and forth more easily than before. That will advance the state of the arts.

VentureBeat: Was this acquisition inevitable; was Disney the only contender?
Jacob: Maybe Warner Brothers has the size and scale. It would take a big player. I think that Disney is a a good fit given their corporate agenda. Disney demonstrated effectively when they acquired Pixar and Marvel — both these institutions were able to grow and thrive under the Disney family of companies.

Disney wanted to have a visual effects house in-house for a long time. It’s a big advantage. The cost of doing them is a large part of any production budget.

VentureBeat: Both Pixar and Lucasfilm are Bay Area-based. How has that changed their focus?
Jacob: The industry had a different tenor than down South. There is some commonality between Lucas and Pixar: they are both content companies and technology companies. There is technology that was created to make those films.

VentureBeat: Have you always been interested in digital filmmaking?
Jacob: Like most of my generation, I was obsessed with Star Wars. Then I saw Luxo Jr. (Pixar’s 1986 computer-animated short film featuring a hopping lamp). I knew then that Pixar was one of the few places I wanted to be. But I originally came to the Bay Area because both these companies (Lucas and Disney) were here.

VentureBeat: How did you end up as the CTO of Pixar? Did you have a technical background?
Jacob: I actually have a bachelors in mechanical engineering. I applied for the job in my freshman year when I saw the internship flier. I ended up working there for 20 years, and picked up the technical skills on the job. You have to give Steve [Jobs] credit. Combining technology and the arts: it’s tricky to walk two lines in the same institution. It’s a rare company that can do that. Technology was invented and used by both Pixar and Lucas Arts. To create capabilities and then to develop the craft for the purposing of executing entertainment…it’s the legacy we hope to continue on.

Jacob is the CEO of San Francisco-based ToyTalk, launching early next year. Their mission is to create entertainment-powered by characters and conversation.