Koan

» see sseyo.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

SSEYO was founded in 1990 by Tim and Pete Cole, and work on the Koan engine started the same year. A first version reached beta by 1992 and the first public release went out in 1994, published on CD-ROM through Koch Media, with the Koan Pro authoring tool following in 1995. The premise was that you did not write the notes. You wrote the rules, roughly a hundred and fifty musical and sonic parameters, and the engine improvised inside the space those rules left open. Every playback was a different performance of the same piece.

In 1995 SSEYO showed it to Brian Eno, who had been circling this idea for twenty years without a tool that could do it. He started making pieces in Koan Pro, and in April 1996 published twelve of them as Generative Music 1 with SSEYO Koan Software. The release was a floppy disk holding the pieces and the player that produced them, because there was no recording to ship. His diary of that year, A Year with Swollen Appendices, tracks the whole thing as it happened.

Around the engine SSEYO built a platform it called SKIAP, which bundled the authoring tools with standalone players and a browser plugin. Koan Pro ran on 16-bit and 32-bit Windows as well as Mac OS 8 and 9. It never shipped an audio plug-in interface, so getting it to sit inside the software musicians actually sequenced in was awkward, and that awkwardness is a decent part of why Koan stayed a curiosity with a famous endorsement rather than a working tool in studios. The engine itself stopped being extended in 1998, though the platform around it was developed until 2001, the year SSEYO took a BAFTA Interactive Entertainment Award for Technical Innovation.

SSEYO was acquired by Tao Group in 2002. Tao's assets were sold in June 2007 and Koan went with them, which is the point at which the software stopped being available to buy at all.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what eno did with it ~

Eno's argument for the format was historical. He pointed out that until about a hundred years ago every musical event was unique and unrepeatable, and that the gramophone record is what changed that, capturing one performance and letting you hear it identically forever. Generative music, he thought, got the freedom of live performance without the requirement to be in the room. He said he expected his grandchildren to be amazed that people used to listen to exactly the same thing over and over again.

The twelve pieces were not all ambient. A sleeve note published under the pseudonym CSJ Bofop walked through them and noted how far apart they sat, from the near mournful Densities III with its distant bells to Komarek, whose hard angular melodies the writer compared to Schoenberg's early serial work. The note closed on the obvious problem with describing any of them, which is that none of those pieces will ever sound quite that way again.

~ a few kilobytes of music ~

The browser plugin is the part of Koan that reads strangest now. It was programmable live from JavaScript, and by 2001 the engine shipped with a modular synthesizer and a format called Vector Audio, which could carry a complicated generative piece, synthesizer patches included, in a few thousand bytes of plain text embedded in a web page.

That number is the whole argument. I came online in 1998 on a 33.6k modem, and at that speed a three minute MP3 was something you started and walked away from, while a few kilobytes of text was already there. A page that arrived instantly and then played music indefinitely without downloading any of it was solving the exact constraint everyone on dial-up lived inside. Koan itself I never ran into, since it was a niche British product sold on CD-ROM in an era when almost nothing crossed to Turkey that way, but the category it sat in was everywhere, and browser audio plugins were a normal thing to have installed.

~ where it went ~

The high point after Eno was probably Ars Electronica in 2003, which ran a 96 hour event called Dark Symphony playing live Koan music from various artists over a 160,000 watt system in the Klangpark in Linz, on the bank of the Danube. Four days of music generated rather than played back, outdoors, is about as literal a demonstration of the idea as anyone managed.

When Tao went under in 2007 the Coles started again. Intermorphic was founded that year and built Noatikl, described plainly as the evolution of Koan and able to import files from the older system, and in 2008 the company bought back the underlying intellectual property. Noatikl 2 arrived in 2012 with its own synthesizer, Noatikl 3 in 2015 with a native iOS app, and from 2017 the line continued under the name Wotja. The engine has outlived every company that owned it. The product called Koan has been unavailable since a Tao Group asset sale that had nothing to do with music.

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