Development of the Koan engine started in 1990, when SSEYO was founded, and by 1992, the first version entered beta testing.
Later that year, SSEYO brought Koan to the attention of Brian Eno, who quickly showed great interest in the product.
Brian Eno, 1996: Some very basic forms of generative music have existed for a long time, but as marginal curiosities.
There are, of course, the ambient works ranging from the dark, almost mournful “Densities III” (complete with distant bells), to translucent “Lysis (Tungsten).” These are contrasted with pieces in dramatically different styles, such as Komarek with its hard-edged, angular melodies, reminiscent of Schoenberg's early serial experiments, and “Klee 42,” whose simple polyphony is similar to that of the early Renaissance.
By 2001, Koan included a modular synthesizer; its engine also featured a file format named Vector Audio, which allowed very complicated generative pieces, complete with full synthesizer sound descriptions, to be delivered in only a few thousand bytes of plain text within a Web page.
In 2012, Intermorphic released Noatikl 2, the first major update since 2007, which introduced the Partikl software synthesizer and Mixtikl mixer product.
Noatikl 3, released in 2015, added a native iOS app together with extensive improvements to the Partikl software synthesizer.