About Us
Intermorphic Ltd. is the developer of Wotja.
Intermorphic
Intermorphic Ltd. (IM) was co-founded in 2007 by Tim Cole & Pete Cole and it is just the two of us.
"Intermorphic" is a word that means "between forms". It was first used by us at SSEYO, a company we co-founded back in 1990 and where we built SSEYO Koan (see Our History). We feel it's still apt for today as we're continuing to innovate & grow .
Multi-platform Wotja is now the evolution of all that we've pioneered over many years of working in the domain of generative music.
We use the terms: Generative Music | InMo Music | Text-to-Music | Reflective Music.
Company Details (Intermorphic Ltd.)
Company Name:
- Intermorphic Limited
Registration Number:
- Registered in England No. 6045407.
Registered Office:
- Intermorphic Ltd., Suites B & D, Burnham Yard, London End, Beaconsfield, Bucks HP9 2JH, UK.
VAT No:
- GB 935 3394 09
ICO:
- Intermorphic Ltd. is registered with the Information Commissioner's Office, with Register of Data Controller Reference: ZA034466. Visit http://ico.org.uk/ for information on data protection issues.
Legal:
History of Intermorphic and Evolution of Wotja
Note: intermorphic.com is now used as a documentation archive for our older apps.
Wotja is a powerful & FREE system for on-device generation of Live Generative Music & MIDI. It delivers great results and can even be used by Game & App Developers. It is actively developed by us at Intermorphic, meaning it continues to evolve.
It also has a distinguished provenance, being the consolidation and continued evolution of 1992+ SSEYO Koan, 2000-2007 intent Sound System (incl. APRE) & SSEYO miniMIXA, 2007+ Noatikl, 2007+ Liptikl, 2008+ Mixtikl & 2012+ Tiklbox.
The importance of history
Knowing where you came from and how you got to where you are is important. It's why people search out their family tree. It means something and it helps you understand your place in the world. It can even help give a sense of purpose and direction.
The history of software is no different, it's a journey. And like any long journey it can take many interesting twists and turns. And, we give huge thanks to past users who purchased, used or enjoyed any of our products, whatever they were.
1986: The Initial Idea
Way back in 1986 we had an idea, an idea that set us on a journey that we are still on today with Wotja.
1990: SSEYO - SSEYO Koan
It took us until 1990 before we felt ready to set up a company, SSEYO, to pursue our idea.
SSEYO Koan is still with us, Tim Cole and Pete Cole, at Intermorphic! For full details see: SSEYO Koan
It was at SSEYO in 1990 that we started work on SSEYO Koan and the SSEYO Koan Music Engine (SKME), our first real-time music generation engine.
We sent out the first betas of SSEYO Koan branded apps in 1992.
In 1994 we published our first publicly released app SSEYO Koan Plus.
Note: SSEYO Koan Plus generated what we referred to at the time as "Koan Music". The genre later became better known as "generative music", a term coined by Brian Eno during the time he was working with SSEYO Koan Pro, below. 25+ years later SSEYO Koan would go on to become what is now called Wotja.
At about the time in 1995 as we were readying for release the SSEYO Koan Pro V1.0 authoring system, we were lucky enough to bring it to the attention of Brian Eno.
By the autumn of 1995 Eno had started working with SSEYO Koan Pro culminating in the 1996 release of "Generative Music 1 with SSEYO Koan Software".
Luckily for researchers, Eno's early relationship with SSEYO Koan and Intermorphic co-founder Tim Cole was captured and published in his 1995 diary "A Year with Swollen Appendices".
SSEYO Koan Pro was used by other talented generative artists such as Timothy Didmyus, Mark Harrop, Jamuud and Andrew Garton.
Prior to 2002 when it was acquired by Tao Group, SSEYO developed a number of other Koan products and won a BAFTA award. After acquisition amongst other things it developed 'SSEYO miniMIXA', one of the first native mobile music making apps for use on Smartphones, and won another BAFTA award.
Tao Group went into administration in 2007.
See also:2007: Intermorphic - Tikltech Apps & Engines
In 2007 (the same year that saw the demise of Tao Group, referenced above) we co-founded Intermorphic. We did so to carry on our work with generative music systems. Intermorphic owns all past SSEYO IP.
This marked the second stage of our evolution and lasted 10 years. Amongst other things it involved a clean-room rebuild of the Koan Music Engine which could load/play SSEYO Koan files.
We decided for a number of reasons to adopt a new branding and thus was born the Noatikl Music Engine. We also created two other engines, a Text engine (Liptikl) and the Partikl Sound Engine, a new sound engine.
These engines were at the heart of a number of our tikl-branded apps whose history is also captured on the Intermorphic.com website. They include: Noatikl, Mixtikl, Liptikl and Tiklbox.
2017: Intermorphic - Wotja
In 2017 we starting the process of consolidating the Noatikl, Mixtikl, Liptikl & Tiklbox Apps into one App/range called Wotja, an App that we continue to evolve today.
Although we started experimenting with "Text to Music" in 2013 and used it in Wotja 1, i.e. towards the end of our Tikltech stage, it was only with the 2017 release of Wotja 4 that we really commenced our third stage and for which the term Reflective Music is well suited.
For more on this and thinking behind it, read the in depth PalmSounds interview with Tim Cole.
See the Wotja page and Wotja User Guide for more information about the latest version of Wotja!
Tip: The documentation and history of Wotja from 2014-2022 is to be found in the App archive on Intermorphic.com. Everything related to Wotja from 2023 onwards (i.e. Wotja 23+) can be found on the wotja.com website.
Historical Recap
We started working on generative music apps way back in the 1990s. Our first app was SSEYO Koan, released in 1992. That was followed by Noatikl [itself the evolution of SSEYO Koan], Liptikl, Mixtikl, Tiklbox and 2016 and earlier Wotja apps. However, by 2016 we realized that to be able to keep moving forward we had to consolidate the capabilities of all of these into just one powerful Generative Music System app. We decided that Wotja was the best app to take it all forward. Here is how that consolidation went.
Wotja A
In 2017 we completed the first round of our 'app consolidation' for the iOS/macOS versions of our apps, therefore Wotja at that time was 'Apple-only'. To keep things simple our docs referred to this original Apple-only 'variant' as 'Wotja A' (NB: On the App Store it was still called 'Wotja' and had the foregoing icon).
Wotja X
For 2018 we developed a new cross-platform UI variant (i.e. 'X') called 'Wotja X' which had the foregoing icon.
Wotja V5
By the time of Wotja V5.4 the two variants ('Wotja A', 'Wotja X') were major feature equivalent and so we referred to both as just 'Wotja' and they had one User Guide. See Wotja 5 User Guide and Wotja 5 Info page that was common to both.
Wotja V19
By 2019 there was just one Wotja variant but with different app versions (see Wotja 19). These versions all used the X-platform UI approach we developed for 'Wotja X'. It was at this time we changed our Wotja version numbering system to be one that reflects the year of release, i.e. in 2019 we had Wotja V19, keeping it simpler for all!
Wotja V20
2020 saw the start of a whole new and exciting Wotja product cycle where we were finally able to consolidate our Wotja app product range into just 2 apps per OS platform (yay!). These included the TV player apps as relevant (iOS, Android) and we also added an all new Apple Watch app (iOS). See Wotja 20.
Our Trademarks
Intermorphic, Wotja, Wotja Music/Audio/Text/Script Engine, Wotja Pak, Noatikl, Mixtikl, Liptikl, Partikl, Tiklbox and their corresponding logos are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Intermorphic Ltd. in the UK and/or other countries. Other products mentioned may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies and are the sole property of their respective manufacturers. WOTJA is a registered trademark nos: EU 012329199, US 4702614. The Device is a registered trademark nos: EU 017082496, US 5511542.
Our Branding
Our primary brands are now Intermorphic and Wotja.
A bit of background
Back in 2007 we carefully chose our company name and settled on Intermorphic as intermorphic means "between forms". Besides, it also provided a link to our SSEYO past as we had used that term then, too.
We knew right from the start that we were going to build a new generative music engine which would work like the SSEYO Koan Music Engine in that its live note composition output would change "shape" to mold to / integrate / accommodate various inputs, be these external or other internal. One of the ways we saw it was as a kind of dynamic note lattice (a lattice is a regular structure that has "shape") so this is where our term kinetic lattice comes from - a "Kinetic Lattice" is always "between forms" so is perpetually intermorphic.
However, for a number of reasons we decided our first app was instead going to be a lyric generator ☺. As it is often handy to look at things from a different or "elliptical" perspective we decided our first app brand should be "Liptikl".
A the same time we were working on the brand for our upcoming generative music engine. We wanted a brand that could have a nod towards Koan, which is how we then came up with Noatikl. Even better that "Tikl" was a perfect abbreviation for The Intermorphic Kinetic Lattice.
It all turned out that this letter-play was quite serendipitous as it allowed us to refer to our underlying basket of technologies and frameworks as The Intermorphic Kinetic Lattice Technologies or "TIKLTECH" / "Tikltech" (The Intermorphic Kinetic Lattice TECHnologies). A perfect wrap up!
Of course, we knew that when it comes to branding taxonomy the normal practice is 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.). However, we have always been a bit different, and so we decided at the time it was OK to go with an appended product stem, "Tikl", as it also allowed our engine / tool product brands of the day to stand on their own two feet, independent of the main company brand. See our archive page for links to archive material on our "Tiklapps".
Nothing stands still and we continue to keep innovating so in 2016 we came to the conclusion it was time to take the bold step to try to fold all our music apps into one. Intermorphic had over the years become quite a strong brand in its own right and we had already established a great, fresh, non-technical music app brand in the form of Wotja.
It was therefore obvious what brands to choose for the next stage of our journey - Intermorphic for our engines and Wotja for our app.
In addition to domains for our trademarked products, we also own a number of domain including the following (we've been active in the area of generative music for ages [since 1990 effectively]): generativemusic.net, generativemusic.co.uk, reflectivemusic.com, peaceablemusic.com, wotjamusic.com, text-to-music.com, mymindfulmusic.com and inmomusic.com.
Our Websites
Layout for wotja.com and intermorphic.com (Bootstrap Docs)
As a general template for our website layout we use the "Bootstrap Docs" layout (https://getbootstrap.com/docs/5.1/getting-started/introduction/).
* Bootstrap Docs
* Copyright 2011-2021 The Bootstrap Authors
* Copyright 2011-2021 Twitter, Inc.
* Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
We are hugely grateful to the developers for making it available under CC3.0 and it is, quite frankly, awesome.
All-in-all it means we use "Bootstrap Docs" files (docs.css and docs.min.js) as well as the "Bootstrap Docs" webpage html. We have customized some of the html, id and class names etc. and have created our own customized CSS/JS overrides (im.css and im.js). We have then added own content (html, text, images etc).
* Bootstrap Code (v5.3.2)
* Copyright (c) 2011-2023 The Bootstrap Authors
* Licenced under MIT
* Bootstrap Icons (v1.11.1)
* Copyright 2019-2023 The Bootstrap Authors
* Licensed under MIT
Credits
Intermorphic is Tim Cole & Pete Cole - yes, just two brothers - and we have now been working together in generative music since 1990. However, without the incredible support and interest from so many over the years then we would not be where we are today with our current Apps, Engines and Content. Our thank-you list below is an ever expanding one, in no particular order, and does not include everyone (sorry to those we have missed!). We offer our heartfelt thanks and gratitude as follows:
- To our beloved mum and wives as without their generous support, quiet encouragement and long suffering patience we would never have had the strength to continue on this very long and challenging road. We are only here through their kindness.
- To the awesomely talented Mark Harrop and Timothy Didymus, longstanding friends, colleagues & artists who are also occasional advisors and contributors. When times are hard their sublime generative music creations have given us the much needed inspiration to press onwards. On many occasions we have also had the pleasure of commissioning them and what you hear is in good part down to their absolute genius - we love you dearly, thank you!
- To all customers, and most especially those who wish to continue with us as we move forward - we love you, thank you!
- To everyone who has helped others e.g. via forum posts, blogs, tweets, reviews, social media etc. or otherwise written nicely about or shared content they have made with our apps and in so doing helped others to find us - we love you, thank you!
- To our outstanding beta testers for their testing efforts and everyone who has given feedback, found bugs and helped with suggestions - we love you, thank you!
And from our SSEYO days
- To early content creators such as David Muddyman (AKA Jamuud), Andrew Garton, Paul Weir and Igor Dvorkin.
- To all our old SSEYO friends and colleagues including Jon Pettigrew, John Wilkinson, Steve Crawshaw & Chandra Modi and including from later days (1996 onwards) Jerry Leach, Paul Blampied, Jerry Swan, Nick Barefoot, Simon Robertson, Kerry-Anna Saia, Natalie Da Gama Rose, John Tenkoni and also including Jesper Bennedbaek, Wenwu Wang etc. from our Tao Group audio days.
- Finally, enormous thanks of course to Brian Eno for his support and kindness to us in the SSEYO Koan years, out of which arose his pioneering release "Generative Music 1" with SSEYO Koan Software.