Intermorphic - About Us

We develop generative - music : mixer : lyric - apps & content for iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac and Windows including VST, AU & Browser plugins.

Our goal is to help you create and play with ideas.

Company Background

Intermorphic (IM) was incorporated at the beginning of 2007 by Pete Cole and Tim Cole. The two of us are IM. We have a passion for, and long history of, developing and making available our own trans-platform generative (music) technologies, audio technologies & applications. We have seen these deployed on mobile devices (Window Mobile, Symbian, TaoOS [Linux, Nucleus, other embedded OS]) to PCs (Windows, Mac, VST, AU and browser plugins).

By way of introduction, we are both co-founders of SSEYO Ltd, which we founded in 1990 and which was acquired by Tao Group in 2002. We worked there until June 2007, when Tao folded (the engineering staff and management of which are now behind a new company, Antix Labs).

Although SSEYO pioneered many things, it was probably best known through Brian Eno's use of the SSEYO Koan Generative Music system in his 1996 "Generative Music 1" with SSEYO Koan software release (published by SSEYO and Opal Music).

SSEYO was also home to the ideas behind SSEYO miniMIXA which has now morphed into Intermorphic Mixtikl.

Intermorphic Liptikl and Noatikl

Following Tao's demise we started developing our first product, a lyric creation tool which we named Intermorphic Liptikl (or liptikl, or we also sometimes use LT for short). Once that was going, we started work on a brand new generative system called Intermorphic Noatikl (or noatikl, or we also sometimes use NT for short).

The Noatikl generative music system has been built completely from scratch to be like SSEYO Koan, but better, and shares no source code from SSEYO Koan. It is what is known in industry terms as a totally "clean room" development. It can be said that Noatikl is the next stage of evolution for the SSEYO Koan generative music system: Noatikl is Koan evolved, and Koan lives through intermorphic.

Intermorphic Sound System (intent Sound System)

In May 2008 Intermorphic acquired all rights in and to the Tao intent Sound System (iSS), which comprised the following:

audio input/output mixers
audio encode/decode framework
audio fx framework
modular midi synth
Koan generative music system
miniMIXA

The intent Sound System has now been rebranded as the Intermorphic Sound System (ISS).

Intermorphic Mixtikl

Mixtikl (or we sometimes use MT for short; you get the drill) shares some original DNA with miniMIXA (mainly related to the Partikl synth side), but this share is rapidly diminishing as Mixtikl develops anew (for example the Noatikl Generative MIDI Music engine within it is all new).

With the release of Mixtikl 2, Mixtikl's "miniMIXA" past is becoming a dim and distant memory as Mixtikl 2 teems with new directions, features and ideas.

Intermorphic Tikl

Intermorphic Tikl [trans-platform intermorphic kreativity layer] is what we lovingly refer to as 'Tikl Tech'. It comprises the ISS, a 2D graphics layer and other Intermorphic libraries.

Now that Mixtikl 2 is released, we also refer to "Tikls" as being text-based Mixtikl mixes or tunes that can be embedded in tweets!

Intermorphic Branding

The rationale for Intermorphic is to build tools to help feed the imagination through helping to generate ideas. With that in mind, the ovals in our logo are meant to represent ideas "popping out" and these are also meant to refer back to our product line branding.

Why did we choose to have tail stems for the IM products (e.g. "Tikl")? We know that when it comes to branding taxonomy that it is normal practise for the common part of a brand (i.e. a stem) to be first, or to prefix other common words (e.g. Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel etc.). When it comes to generating new ideas it is often handy to look at things from a different perspective, therefore we decided to append our product stem, Tikl, instead. This also means that our product brands can stand on their own two feet, independent of the main company brand: IM Noatikl, IM Liptikl, IM Optikl etc.

In addition to domains for our trademarked products, we also own the following domains (we've been active in the area of generative music for ages [since 1990 effectively]): http://www.generativemusic.org, http://www.generativemusic.net, http://www.generativemusic.mobi and http://www.generativemusic.co.uk.

SSEYO (1990 - 2007) » Intermorphic (2007 to date)

SSEYO (www.sseyo.com) was founded in 1990 by Pete and Tim Cole; namely, us, the founders of Intermorphic. SSEYO's positioning was "Mobile Music Making".

SSEYO was acquired by Tao Group in 2002, and then Tao Group went bust in 2007. That means that SSEYO the company was no more as of 2002, and is not a going concern and has no relation to the company Intermorphic. However, because we wanted to continue the life's work we started at SSEYO in the areas of cross-platform generative music tools [like SSEYO Koan] and mobile music mixing tools [formerly miniMIXA], in 2007 we started out completely afresh and co-founded Intermorphic.

We finally got our 'SSEYO back catalogue' back in 2008 when Intermorphic acquired the rights to the SSEYO.com domain, SSEYO trademarks and all the SSEYO, Koan, miniMIXA and iSS related IP (noting that we did not take on SSEYO as a going concern, or get any customer records etc). So, the old SSEYO Koan IP is now in safe "curatorial" hands and, even though it is on the shelf and will not be further developed, maintained or supported, we are using bits of it where we can for parts, i.e. Mixtikl includes some of what was in the iSS, namely the modular MIDI softsynth, aufdio fx framework and audio input/output mixers.

SSEYO Koan - a short history

We founded SSEYO in 1990 and started developing the SSEYO Koan Generative Music Engine (SKME) [which later was at the core of the SSEYO Koan Interactive Audio Platform (SKIAP)].

By 1992 the first version had gone into beta with a small group of select testers. SSEYO Koan software was publically released in 1994, distributed by Koch Media; SSEYO Koan Pro was released in 1995.

In 1995 we managed to bring the SKME to the attention of Brian Eno - and it turned out he was interested in using it! He started creating Koan pieces with SSEYO Koan Pro which, in April 1996, lead to the publication of his seminal title “Generative Music 1 with SSEYO Koan software”. Luckily for researchers, Eno's early relationship with SSEYO Koan was captured in his 1996 diary "A Year with Swollen Appendices". The SKIAP continued to be developed by us at SSEYO until 2001 (when it won an Interactive Entertainment BAFTA - see logo above, linked to Wayback Machine), but the last extension of the SKME per se was in 1998.

In 2002 SSEYO Koan was acquired by Tao Group and development on SSEYO Koan products (such Koan Pro, Koan X and the Koan Plugin) then formally ceased. Tao Group subsequently folded in June 2007 - which meant we became independent again after 17 years!

Noatikl is the spiritual successor to Koan, and provides Koan users a bridge to an exciting future: a new code base & tools that are being maintained, developed and extended to meet new challenges. For example, a runtime Noatikl generative music engine is an integral component of Mixtikl.

SSEYO miniMIXA - a short history

Following SSEYO's acquisition by Tao in 2002, we set about building the intent Sound System [iSS]. This was a comprehensive audio framework and set of related technologies specifically suited to use on mobile. It included a mixer, modular synthesiser, midi synthesiser and a host of other things. One of the products that came out of this was Tao's APRE (Advanced Polyphone Ringone Engine), deployed with Tao's Java Engine.

Following the completion of that work, and starting in 2004, we built the first version of miniMIXA which went on to win a 2005 Interactive Entertainent BAFTA. miniMIXA V2 was released in 2006 and miniMIXA V3 was due for release in 2007, but Tao Group folded before then.

The iSS has now been rebranded "Intermorphic Sound System" [ISS] and some of the miniMIXA technology has been incorporated into Mixtikl.

SSEYO website archive

When we have time we hope to put some of the SSEYO website back on line, but right now we are focused on the future, which is looking very exciting for our family of generative tools.

If you want to go back in history right now, you can access the old SSEYO site at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. The last effective date for the site was March 7 2007 (after which Tao Group cleansed it of all SSEYO information). When accessed from there the menuing no longer seems to work, and some versions now redirect you back to the intermorphic website (in which case try using sseyoindex.html after the SSEYO domain in the Wayback Machine, or sseyo.html).

For those who are interested, we have also now added some of the info to the Founders' History page.

Thanks

For those of you who have in the past used the products we have created, we greatly thank you and we hope you have enjoyed them - we enjoyed creating them!. We hope you remain interested in using and enjoying the new products we are creating. We would love to hear your ideas on other creative tools that you want and would make your creative lives easier.

We hope you would like to sign up to our mailing list, and maybe participate in one of our forums. In any event, please do bookmark our website and return!