Koan Generative Music and Applications

Generative music is fascinating to experiment with, and generative music systems are still really in their infancy. Pete (my brother) and I are co-founders of SSEYO Ltd [link to old site stored at Internet Archive Wayback machine], the company that created the legendary Koan Generative Music Engine, as used by Brian Eno. The Koan music engine is no longer available or supported, but worry not! It has now superceded by a new trans-generative music engine, Noatikl, that we have also built. The Noatikl trans-generative music engine can play older Koan pieces, and it is made available through our new company, Intermorphic.

As far as SSEYO goes, it was founded in 1990 and developed SSEYO Koan Pro, Koan X, the Koan Plugin (Internet audio) and the SSEYO Koan Music Engine. The SSEYO website (old version above) _would_ have all the information you could wish to find on these things, but is was sadly closed by Tao Group, who owned it. For all the examples below you will need to have downloaded and installed the SSEYO Plugin, which is no longer available (but see archive above if interested).

If you have the SSEYO Plugin installed (and are using Internet Explorer) you should now be hearing "Weirdspace6", a generative music (or intermorphic) composition. This uses granular synthesis techniques and is embedded (as vector audio) in the text at the bottom of the page. It is only 447 bytes in size.

I have created a number of applications over the years. Most, if not all, reside on the SSEYO website (these links are not correct, see the old archive site, above):

Koan^Oasis
World's first collaborative online generative compositions, and done with SSEYO Koan

Freesense sonified emails
Sonified emails using the SSEYO Koan plugin

EZ Koan
Easily add SSEYO Koan content to your webpage (content by Tim Didymus)

Freemixer - MP3
Mix MP3 - Flash 4 app developed in 1998! (content by Tim Didymus)

Freemixer - General MIDI
Mix SSEYO Koan templates (optimised for Creative Labs soundcards) - Flash app developed in 1998! (content by Tim Didymus)

Freemixer - XG MIDI
Mix XG SSEYO Koan templates - Flash app developed in 1998! (Content by Tim Didymus)

EZSynth 1
Use real-time SSEYO Koan synth effects to make cool sounds (Flash design by Simon Robertson)

EZModz
Details on the "Koan-modulez" used in EZSynth1 (Flash design by Simon Robertson)

PDA "PatchMaker"
Example of SSEYO Koan and Flash integration possible on Pocket PC (Compaq iPAQ)

Freedrum
Flash app showing SSEYO Koan integration, created by Toy Satellite and I helped a little :)

Netstream SoundFont, Netstream WAV
Some early examples of downloadable SoundFonts and generative music via the SSEYO Koan plugin