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Tim Cole (AKA Colartz logoColartz)

2x BAFTA Award winnner

Creator

Musician & Guitarist

During my formative years in the early 70s (Exmouth Devon UK) I was lucky to be introduced to the wonderful music of Genesis, John Mclaughlin, David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Supertramp, Roxy Music, Bach and Villa-Lobos etc. Fortunately for me, for my 14th birthday I was given a nylon guitar by my parents. That guitar was the beginning of my lifelong creative journey. Ever since I've been playing & writing music on that and other guitars (and even piano, but those works have now been lost).

Songwriter

In the late 70s I went on to study Physics (Sussex University, Brighton) and afterwards found employment as a development physicist (Edwards High Vacuum, Eastbourne). It was then I got properly hooked on writing songs. With a job I was able to buy myself a Portastudio 144 Mk1 and I even managed to afford a couple of studio recording sessions! It is a somewhat different process to writing my guitar pieces and I get a great deal of pleasure out of it - so I am still doing it today. I've around 20 or so good new songs to get around to recording when I can figure out what they are really about.

Visual Artist

One evening in the 1980s I went to a concert in Brighton where Michael Hedges was playing. He was an incredible guitarist and composer and he simply blew me away. As a result for a few years I mostly gave up playing and writing for guitar. I knew I needed to find a new creative outlet and that concert turned out to be the trigger that lead me to starting my artworks. This is also where my pseudonym 'Colartz' (pronounced as 'colours' came from).

Generative Musician (Wotja)

As a physicist I learnt that you need to have a clear idea of something before you can figure out how to build it (or how to get it built). See Technologist. It was never easy to do that for the Wotja Generative Music System , a stochastic "AI-free" system for generating mainly ambient music. It marries chance with heuristrics and techniques developed over many years of experimentation and serendipity (which began in earnest in Brighton in 1990). It has been an enormous (and still ongoing in 2026) challenge to build it and has has required every ounce of both my creative energies and those of my brother, Pete, too!

Technologist

SSEYO

1990 - 2002

Co-founder

Some time in the early 80s I read Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy. I imagined it might be possible to build something to create a real-time "intermorphic" performance.

So, in 1990 I took myself off to do an MBA at Cranfield School of Management and where I am now an alumni.

Whilst there I co-founded SSEYO Ltd. and it went on to develop the SSEYO Koan Generative Music System.

The Koan engine was principally designed / developed by Pete Cole (my brother) and me, with important input from Timothy Didymus and Brian Eno .

BAFTA Award Winner: We were very lucky and honoured that SSEYO Koan won a BAFTA in 2001 .

Tao Group

2002 - 2007

Head of Audio

In 2002 SSEYO was acquired by Tao Group and I worked there as Head of Audio.

At Tao, Pete and I developed some spectacular audio technologies (e.g. intent Sound System) and apps (e.g. SSEYO miniMIXA, one of the earliest powerful music apps) for mobile devices.

It was my view at the time that "the mobile phone is the next electric guitar " (via Internet Archive Wayback Machine), something that has now come true to some extent.

BAFTA Award Winner: We were obviously delighted when SSEYO miniMIXA won a BAFTA in 2005 .

Sadly, however, Tao then went bust in 2007.

Intermorphic

2007 - Today

Co-founder

In 2007 Pete and I co-founded Intermorphic Ltd. .

We set about building Liptikl (something altogether new) and Noatikl (a clean room developed replacement for Koan that could play Koan files).

In 2008 Intermorphic acquired the IP rights to Koan, miniMIXA & the intent Sound System. That tech base helped us develop Mixtikl .

We then went on to create Tiklbox and then Wotja .

We then set about consolidating all past apps into Wotja, achieved by Wotja V5. We continue to actively develop and evolve Wotja to this day.

Get Wotja : Wotja is free and available for iOS, macOS, Windows and Android.

Contact Me

Electronically:

All music, art and media works on this website created by and are copyright of John Tim Cole (AKA Tim Cole or 'Colartz'), all rights reserved.

Materials of others

Any app images linked to on the Intermorphic and Wotja websites are copyright Intermorphic Ltd. App Store buttons, logos or products mentioned are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies and are the sole property of their respective manufacturers.

Cookies

On my website I do not use Google Analytics, but instead use privacy-focused Plausible.io. This does not use Cookies and does not collect any personal data or personally identifiable information (PII). All information collected is anonymous – so I don’t know who you are; just that somebody visited my site.

Note: Web pages that use embedded YouTube videos seem to attract google.com and double-click.net cookies.

Website layout (Bootstrap Docs)

As a general template for this website layout I use the "Bootstrap Docs" layout (https://getbootstrap.com/docs/5.1/getting-started/introduction/).

 * Bootstrap Docs (https://getbootstrap.com/)
 * Copyright 2011-2021 The Bootstrap Authors
 * Copyright 2011-2021 Twitter, Inc.
 * Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
 * For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/.

I am hugely greatful to the developers for making it available under CC3.0 and it is, quite frankly, awesome.

All-in-all it means I use "Bootstrap Docs" files (docs.css and docs.min.js) as well as the "Bootstrap Docs" webpage html. I have customised some of the html, id and class names etc. and have created my own customised CSS/JS overrides (cz.css and cz.js). I have then added own content (html, text, images etc).