Dead Media Beat: Eno's Generative Music 1

http://www.intermorphic.com/sseyo

(((The closets of electronic art are full of melancholy tales like this.)))

(((Now imagine counting all the dead synthesizers.)))

Link: Intermorphic > SSEYO archive.

You will have reached this page if you had tried to visit http://www.sseyo.com. This is the entry point for anything "SSEYO".

SSEYO was the company founded in 1990 by the Coles. The SSEYO trademarks and SSEYO.com domain are now owned by Intermorphic, which was founded by the Coles in 2007.

SSEYO developed the Koan Generative Music Engine, as used by Brian Eno in his "Generative Music 1" release. It developed interactive generative music browser plugins, tools and content until it was acquired by Tao Group in 2002, when development on Koan stopped. Koan has been replaced by Intermorphic's totally new, clear-roomed developed successor to Koan: Noatikl.

Whilst at Tao the SSEYO founders developed SSEYO miniMIXA, which was released to the market in 2004. miniMIXA V3 was in the process of being readied for the market, but Tao Group folded before it could be released. Intermorphic are porting and extending miniMIXA, and have renamed it Mixtikl.

Intermorphic owns all the SSEYO, Koan, miniMIXA and iSS IP that was formerly owned by Tao Group.

We hope to put some of the SSEYO website back on line at some point (when we have time). But until then, if you want to go back in history you can access it at the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. The last effective date for the site was March 7 2007 (after that date Tao Group got rid of all SSEYO information). The only slight problem is that 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).

(((Here's a nifty little generative system that's been up and running, in Austria, since 1995. All its links have succumbed to link-rot, but, well, Mozart's music is hard to kill no matter how frail the composer was.)))

http://sunsite.univie.ac.at/Mozart/dice/#options

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(((This exciting correction just in: Eno's original generative tools NOT LITERALLY DEAD! Have evolved into strange, organically-grown, distributive form!)))

From: tim tim at colartz.com

Date: October 4, 2008 8:47:32 PM GMT+02:00

To: [email protected]

Subject: Koan, SSEYO and your blog post today

Hi Bruce (((Yo!)))

http://blog.wired.com/sterling/2008/10/dead-media-beat.html

Thanks very much for blogging about SSEYO! Nice to know anyone cares enough to mention it. :)

Thanks to your post we have clarified what we said on that page (http://www.intermorphic.com/sseyo/). It is not as bad as it first seemed :)

We realise in hindsight that what we had written (only put up a few days ago) was not particularly helpful, and so we have changed it! We had only just managed to secure the SSEYO.com domain from an interloper - it took us a few months to get it back following our April 08 acquisition of the SSEYO etc IP from Tao Groups IP owner (the VC that backed it, as it happens). It is all a long long long and painful story, but we at least now have control of the code again, and are doing what we should have done in the first place: growing the products organically.

Maybe one day you might be interested in Noatikl or Mixtikl, as they mature.... we have a nicely growing forum btw - http://forum.intermorphic.com. (((Yeah man, the first time I feel the need to whip out some emergent, generative, ambient music tracks, you guys will be first on my list. As, in fact, you were the first on ANYBODY's list. Here's to a bright future.)))