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Koan is a generative music engine created by SSEYO, a company founded by Pete Cole and Tim Cole. The Koan technology is now owned by Intermorphic Limited, co-founded by the Cole brothers in 2007.
The SSEYO Koan Interactive Audio Platform (SKIAP) consisted of the core Koan generative music engine (the SSEYO Koan Generative Music Engine. or SKME), a set of authoring tools (SSEYO Koan Pro and SSEYO Koan X), a set of stand-alone Koan Music players (SSEYO Koan Plus, SSEYO Koan File Player and SSEYO Koan Album Player), and a plug-in for internet browsers such as Internet Explorer and Netscape.
Development of the Koan engine started in 1990, when SSEYO was founded, and by 1992, the first version entered beta testing. Distributed by Koch Media, the first edition of Koan was publicly released in 1994, followed by the Koan Pro authoring tool in 1995.
Later that year, SSEYO brought Koan to the attention of Brian Eno, who quickly showed great interest in the product. He began creating pieces with Koan Pro, collecting and publishing them in his 1996 work "Generative Music 1 with SSEYO Koan Software". This release featured a floppy disk containing the SSEYO Koan Plus player and a set of 12 Koan generative-music pieces that he authored. Eno's early relationship with Koan was captured in his 1996 diary A Year with Swollen Appendices.
Brian Eno, 1996:
Some very basic forms of generative music have existed for a long time, but as marginal curiosities. Wind chimes are an example, but the only compositional control you have over the music they produce is in the original choice of notes that the chimes will sound. Recently, however, out of the union of synthesisers and computers, some much finer tools have evolved. Koan Software is probably the best of these systems, allowing a composer to control not one but one hundred and fifty musical and sonic parameters within which the computer then improvises (as wind improvises the wind chimes).
The works I have made with this system symbolize to me the beginning of a new era of music. Until 100 years ago, every musical event was unique: music was ephemeral and unrepeatable and even classical scoring couldn't guarantee precise duplication. Then came the gramophone record, which captured particular performances and made it possible to hear them identically over and over again.
But now there are three alternatives: live music, recorded music and generative music. Generative music enjoys some of the benefits of both its ancestors. Like live music it is always different. Like recorded music it is free of time-and-place limitations - you can hear it when and where you want.
I really think it is possible that our grandchildren will look at us in wonder and say, "You mean you used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again?"
Using the pseudonym CSJ Bofop, 1996:
Each of the twelve pieces on Generative Music 1 has a distinctive character. There are, of course, the ambient works ranging from the dark, almost mournful “Densities III” (complete with distant bells), to translucent “Lysis (Tungsten).” These are contrasted with pieces in dramatically different styles, such as Komarek with its hard-edged, angular melodies, reminiscent of Schoenberg's early serial experiments, and “Klee 42,” whose simple polyphony is similar to that of the early Renaissance. But of course, the great beauty of Generative Music is that those pieces will never sound quite that way again.
The Koan Pro software was available for Microsoft Windows (16- and 32-bit versions), as well as Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9. Integration with existing digital audio workstations could be difficult, as the software did not include an audio plug-in interface.
Although SKIAP was developed until 2001, the last extension of the SKME itself was in 1998, as SSEYO concentrated on developing technology around the music engine, including real-time music synthesis and a highly programmable internet browser plug-in wrapper.
The SSEYO Koan Plugin for web browsers was programmable in real-time through JavaScript, and was used to create several interesting interactive applications for web browsers. By 2001, Koan included a modular synthesizer; its engine also featured a file format named Vector Audio, which allowed very complicated generative pieces, complete with full synthesizer sound descriptions, to be delivered in only a few thousand bytes of plain text within a Web page. This development led to SSEYO being awarded a BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Award for Technical Innovation in 2001.
SSEYO was eventually acquired by Tao Group, which was sold in 2007. As a result, Koan and the Koan Pro authoring tool are no longer commercially available.
In 2007, the original creators of Koan (Pete Cole and Tim Cole) founded a company called Intermorphic to create a new generative system called Noatikl. They acquired the Koan technology and thence described Noatikl as "the evolution of Koan".
Noatikl supports importing data from earlier Koan systems, and offers a variety of audio plug-in implementations for easy integration with modern digital audio workstations. In 2012, Intermorphic released Noatikl 2, the first major update since 2007, which introduced the Partikl software synthesizer and Mixtikl mixer product. Noatikl 3, released in 2015, added a native iOS app together with extensive improvements to the Partikl software synthesizer.
In 2003, Ars Electronica held a 96-hour musical event entitled "Dark Symphony", playing live Koan music from various artists over a 160,000-watt PA in Linz's Klangpark on the banks of the Danube.
Digital music technology encompasses digital instruments, computers, electronic effects units, software, or digital audio equipment by a performer, composer, sound engineer, DJ, or record producer to produce, perform or record music. The term refers to electronic devices, instruments, computer hardware, and software used in performance, playback, recording, composition, mixing, analysis, and editing of music.
Ardour is a hard disk recorder and digital audio workstation application that runs on Linux, macOS, FreeBSD and Microsoft Windows. Its primary author is Paul Davis, who was also responsible for the JACK Audio Connection Kit. It is intended as a digital audio workstation suitable for professional use.
Virtual Studio Technology (VST) is an audio plug-in software interface that integrates software synthesizers and effects units into digital audio workstations. VST and similar technologies use digital signal processing to simulate traditional recording studio hardware in software. Thousands of plugins exist, both commercial and freeware, and many audio applications support VST under license from its creator, Steinberg.
Pro Tools is a digital audio workstation (DAW) developed and released by Avid Technology for Microsoft Windows and macOS. It is used for music creation and production, sound for picture and, more generally, sound recording, editing, and mastering processes.
A digital audio workstation (DAW) is an electronic device or application software used for recording, editing and producing audio files. DAWs come in a wide variety of configurations from a single software program on a laptop, to an integrated stand-alone unit, all the way to a highly complex configuration of numerous components controlled by a central computer. Regardless of configuration, modern DAWs have a central interface that allows the user to alter and mix multiple recordings and tracks into a final produced piece.
In computing, a visual programming language or block coding is a programming language that lets users create programs by manipulating program elements graphically rather than by specifying them textually. A VPL allows programming with visual expressions, spatial arrangements of text and graphic symbols, used either as elements of syntax or secondary notation. For example, many VPLs are based on the idea of "boxes and arrows", where boxes or other screen objects are treated as entities, connected by arrows, lines or arcs which represent relations.
Generative music is a term popularized by Brian Eno to describe music that is ever-different and changing, and that is created by a system.
Acid Pro is a professional digital audio workstation (DAW) software program currently developed by Magix Software. It was originally called Acid pH1 and published by Sonic Foundry, later by Sony Creative Software as Acid Pro, and since spring 2018 by Magix as both Acid Pro and a simplified version, Acid Music Studio. Acid Pro 11 supports 64-bit architectures, and has MIDI, ASIO, VST, VST3, DirectX Audio, and 5.1 surround sound support.
Logic Pro is a proprietary digital audio workstation (DAW) and MIDI sequencer software application for the macOS platform developed by Apple Inc. It was originally created in the early 1990s as Notator Logic, or Logic, by German software developer C-Lab which later went by Emagic. Apple acquired Emagic in 2002 and renamed Logic to Logic Pro. It is the second most popular DAW – after Ableton Live – according to a survey conducted in 2015.
Nodal is a generative software application for composing music. The software was produced at the Centre for Electronic Media Art (CEMA), Monash University, Australia. It uses a novel method for the notation and playing of MIDI based music. This method is based around the concept of a user-defined graph. The graph consists of nodes and edges. The composer interactively defines the graph, which is then traversed by any number of virtual players that play the musical events as they encounter them on the graph. The time taken by a player to travel from one node to another is based on the length of the edges that connect the nodes.
Tao Group was a software company with headquarters in Reading, Berkshire, UK. It developed the Intent software platform, which enabled content portability by delivering services in a platform-independent format called Virtual Processor (VP). The business's IP portfolio was sold in May 2007 to Cross Atlantic Capital Partners.
A Year with Swollen Appendices is a book by Brian Eno. The paperback book was published by Faber and Faber in 1996 and is divided into two sections. The first part is a diary covering the year 1995, the second part, the 'swollen appendices' of the title is a collection of essays, short stories and correspondence. It was re-released with a new introduction by the author in 2021.
Yoshio Machida is a Japanese experimental musician, a steelpanist, composer, and visual artist.
Brian Peter George St John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, also known by the mononym Eno, is an English musician, composer, record producer and visual artist. He is best known for his pioneering contributions to the ambient music and electronic genres and for his work in rock, artistic pop and minimalist drone music. A self-described "non-musician", Eno has helped introduce unconventional concepts and approaches to contemporary music. He has been described as one of popular music's most influential and innovative figures. In 2019, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as a member of Roxy Music.
The Kronos is a music workstation manufactured by Korg that combines nine different synthesizer sound engines with a sequencer, digital recorder, effects, a color touchscreen display and a keyboard. Korg's latest flagship synthesizer series at the time of its announcement, the Kronos series was announced at the winter NAMM Show in Anaheim, California in January 2011.
Magnus Choir is a commercial, proprietary music software synthesizer, for the Microsoft Windows and macOS operating systems, written by Daniel Laiseca and developed by Syntheway Virtual Musical Instruments. The first version was released in 2005.
Timothy Didymus is a British artist and musician based in Brighton. He is considered a pioneer in the field of generative music. Didymus has collaborated with artists such as Brian Eno, Cornelia Sollfrank, Emilia Telese and presented at institutions and festivals such as ZKM, Ars Electronica, International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Werkleitz Biennale of Multimedia Arts, Liverpool Biennial, De La Warr Pavilion, Fort Process.