Koan - Self Generative Music Software
An Interview with Koan Inventor Tim Cole
While net.radio projects are booming and the enthusiasm of the one-to-many-model of RealAudio is on its climax, critical minds wonder what the noise is all about. One of them is Tim Cole, musician, co-founder and Managing Director of SSEYO Ltd., a small company based outside of London, which has become well known for its achievements in the field of generative music software development.
Last month, SSEYO (as one of only two European companies) signed an agreement with Netscape to make its Interactive Koan Music Control Plugin (IKMC) available on the Netscape SmartUpdate site. The IKMC allows pieces of generative music to be created dynamically, in real- time and according to the users actions. IKMC morphs the soundfiles of different WebPages smoothly, while the user is going from one page to another.
Manu Luksch met Tim Cole at the Greyworld Studio in London to talk about new perspectives of the use of audio online, about Eno Brian, Cool Britannia, Microsoft and other stuff...
When did you start working on the idea of generative music?
Tim Cole: In 1986 I had the idea to create a hardware unit to play a hyperinstrument. I thought of this for three or four years, and then decided to do a business degree to meet people to create a company for it. In 1990 SSEYO got founded and we started working on the development of such a hardware and software system. The first product release of SSEYO was Koan Plus in 1994, a player that created ‚Koan' music out of koan files - we didn't call it generative music that time, because we didn't really know what it was to call it apart from Koan: ever-changing, never the same twice, dynamically created on-the-fly ...
What does the name ‚Koan' stand for?
Tim Cole: Koan is a Zen word, which means ‚mystery', or ‚puzzle with no logical solution'- because you never know what's happening next, it's never the same, you have to participate and put yourself in a position of what the possibilities are to appreciate it the most. But we were basically just looking for a name, which was interesting, reflective and created the feel we were looking for.
Did Brian Eno use Koan software in order to create ‚Generative Music 1' in 1996?
Tim Cole: We sent Koan Plus to Brian Eno amongst other people, and a year later we started working with him. Soon after our collaboration started, we were able to release Koan Pro, an authoring tool, which Brian Eno used to create his compositions ‚Generative Music 1' - which coined the name as well.
Did SSEYO profit from Eno's reputation to gain public attention?
Tim Cole: Nobody would say we exploited Eno or that he exploited us, we were both just doing things which interested us. He was actually very happy to collaborate. He said he had been waiting for twenty years to find a system that would allow him to do what he wanted to do. And we were really happy to work with him, because he had such skill in creating sound environments. A great collaboration, we really enjoyed working with him and I think it worked very well for both of us.
The latest version of the SSEYO authoring systems is Koan Pro 2.1. It allows the user to modify about 200 musical and sonic parameters - the composer defines the rules within which the computer generated improvisations and variations are created. How creative is the software, and how creative is the user?
Tim Cole: The question "what is creativity," as computers become more and more part of the creative process, is an interesting one. The tools themselves become an integral part of the creative outcome. Every tool you use constrains you in doing or proceeding in different ways. But when the tool becomes actually part of the output, well this is the next step. This is a totally different situation from using paints or whatever - once you have used them they are there, they are part of a work, but they don't become an active part.
At This point Andrew Shoben (Greyworld) intervenes:
I see three levels of creativity. There is level one, where SSEYO might write a piece of software, which is a tool for generating music, which itself is not an artistic endeavour but a creative act. Level two would be, say, Brian Eno, who uses this engine to create his music - he is a second level author, not in sense of importance, but in the sense that he is a different kind of author from SSEYO. Level three might be Mr. Smith from down the street who walks through the shopping centre, where the sound installation is placed, and creates a piece of music by being there, by his interaction. But it was Eno who created the environment, who built the garden of music that this guy Smith grows, and it was SSEYO who created the universe in which the garden is situated.
The first Koan software was an off-line tool. What role did the emergence of the Internet play for SSEYO?
Tim Cole: Since 1996 we've focused on the internet - first as a communication tool, but then also as a way of reaching the new medium itself: Its a different way of looking at what the receiver is. The receiver has been a radio, record deck or CD player, on the internet it is actually a sound card and a computer.
There are so many reasons why generative systems are appropriate for the internet. Bandwidth is just one issue. Generative files are tiny, because you plug the sound into an engine on your local hard-disk, which creates music, just as you can do with graphics, e.g. screensavers. Files, that can play for hours without looping, are often less than 10 kb in size.
The fixation with recorded, precanned, one-way broadcast has become an old model. It will never go away completely, but I think the internet is not so much about broadcast, but about what individuals can do together: learn and share. Generative systems break with this old model, things don't need to be fixed like in RealAudio. If you write your own music, you use it to have people listen do it. But once they have listened to it, what can they do with it then? They have heard it.
Generative systems allow people to share an experience or to change that material, because they work on a component level, - like we did with Koan^Oasis: we had about ten or twelve artists who contributed various components to a piece, which then actually forms on the PC of the listener.
Could you describe the Koan^Oasis project in detail?
Tim Cole: Koan^Oasis allows collaborating composers to create a piece of music that will change all the time. The participants can add input or change it at any time. You have got an empty website, a ‚container', and any number of artists involved. For example Greyworld, as one of the artists, put a Koan voice on their website, and the ‚container'- website links to it, as well as to a couple of other arists' sites. When you look at the‚container'- page, the components of that piece will dynamically be downloaded onto your computer from across the world. While downloading, the composite piece gets created in real-time. If you are one of the contributors, you could - because it's on your website- change your component any time, and this again will change the nature of the piece, because everything links together within the piece.
Andrew Shoben: It's like an organic environment, where each artist provides a seed and the piece grows them in different ways... it's really cool. You don't need to stay online to listen to it, you can download the page and then keep it going 24 hours day, and it will always change. And if you you link your website to it, you have it on your website too.
(The source code of Koan^Oasis is available as free download on the SSEYO site.)
How deeply can the user influence what the engine actually does?
Tim Cole: We are only just scratching the surface with it. We've got an engine, for which you now could create controls through what we have put on the internet: the interactive music control. They would allow you to change all 200 parameters in real-time. We could actually change the patterns of the morphing process while downloading another WebPages, and do whatever, but it requires a lot of programming skill and time to do that.
Over time we obviously want to work on making it easier to do these things. It opens the door for pages or applets where you could go on the site, and mix your own stuff, if you have the local engine, but it would all stay sort of low bandwidth.
Then also the model keeps changing how you are making money - do you sell authoring tools, do you sell a standard box thing, do you sell applets, do you sell the engine? It's becoming more and more complicated, how you will make money through the internet to finance it all.
At the moment we give plug-ins away for free. We keep reviewing how we make our engines, how can we add value. The other thing is, if we don't give the plugin away for free, nobody can hear it, nobody knows what it does. There is no point buying something you can't hear. That's particular about the internet, you can download something, check it and when you like it, you buy it. It's a model where you have to give away almost everything for free, so it's very risky - if it works, it works, if it doesn't, it doesn't. To do it this way, I think you need a lot of resources to do it properly.
Koan Pro was selected as a Millenium product. What do you think about Cool Britannia and the Millennium Project?
Tim Cole: Something has to be done to support new technologies, new collaborations between artists and technologists - I think they are going hand in hand, they are just getting harder and harder to do. Development by artists or companies of systems like Koan seem to be few and far between, especially in Europe, because it is so expensive in terms of resources to do this kind of development.
So if the government can't do anything, where is the support coming from? Even if the Millennium is just marketing, it's fantastic, because say you as a solo artist develop something. How do you get anybody know about it? That costs lots of money. The Millennium for us is therefore beneficial, it does give us some exposure. Who really cares for that whole Cool Britannia thing? If the government wants to support innovations by naming it Cool Britannia, it's OK. The more they can do for it, the better, because if you look at the resources and amount of money there is in the States - certainly also in the arts and technology area - these staggering amounts of money are not available here. Microsoft is pretty middle-american and its technology has a culture of its own.
This technology culture does filter through and is subversive in its own way, because it is so pervasive. The challenge for European art technology in an environment where underfunding and shoestring budgets are rife is to commercialise their work before the Americans do it.
How do you compete on a market, which is a global market? We are not only talking about a global market for technology, we are also talking about a global market for mind share. If you want to succeed, it depends on some extend on how many people you can influence, or on how many people hear of what you are doing - but how do you reach them?
There needs to be a structural support of the digital media industries - their technology and content. Europeis at the moment very strong in the creative area, but unless pioneering artists get somehow supported, it could end as a sad story.
So if you talk about Cool Britannia and if it is worth having it - at the end of the day survival is difficult. I think you have to be creative in every point that can be there. So at the moment all my creativity goes into the business to find a way to survive. I think there are a lot of issues facing artists, where your creativity goes. If we talk about subversion, for example, what is that nowadays? Maybe if the artist turns their work into a 20 billion company, that's the most subversive thing they can do
Where are the future challenges for SSEYO?
Tim Cole: In a few weeks SSEYO will be revealing the SSEYO Koan Internet Music Mixer (SKIMM), which uses the IKMC and allows people to mix and match generative music online. This is a very exciting development and the next stage on from Koan^oasis - all part of growing a new community, too, as in terms of the collaborative composing process, there is still a lot to be done.
The other thing I think is particular interesting is the marriage of technologies, like Greyworld is doing with the mousemat or its sound environment area ‚The Layer' by combining Koan technology with sensor technology. It allows someone to have a very tactile way of creating material and to interact with the computer in a way it doesn' t require necessarily skill, but still skill can intensify the output results. You don't have to explain generative music - you just tap it and go ‚yeah, right' and grasp in a very emotional sense what's happening, and that's what I think is really interesting about it.
Read also the article about Greyworld, a group of artists using Koan software for interactive installations in public space.
The authoring tool SSEYO KOAN Pro 2.1 as electronic purchase available for £ 139.99, as boxed good for £ 164.49
The latest templates ‚Koan Essentials: Morphing Drum `n' Bass SoundFont templates' are available for £19.99
Contact: SSEYO on +44 (0) 1628 629828
koaninfo@sseyo.com
www.sseyo.com