Tom Cosm, Orchid, Telepathic Instruments, Hardware Instruments, Music Production, Electronic Music, Chord Generator, Creative Workflow, Ableton Live, Music Innovation
Tom Cosm’s name is synonymous with pushing boundaries in electronic music. From creating some of the earliest Ableton Live tutorial videos on YouTube to hooking brainwave sensors up to Max for Live patches, he’s built a reputation as the person you call when a project seems impossible. His latest achievement? Co-founding Telepathic Instruments and developing Orchid, a futuristic chord generator conceived by Kevin Parker of Tame Impala that Time Magazine recently named one of 2024’s best music inventions.
This conversation explores how an accidental YouTube career, years of experimental sound projects, and a surprise Instagram follow led to a product that’s changing how musicians generate ideas. Whether you’re curious about hardware design, creative workflow, or just want to hear one of electronic music’s most interesting minds reflect on his journey, this interview delivers insights you won’t find anywhere else.
Tom’s presence in the music production education world happened almost by accident. “A friend of mine, Ben, was studying film and needed a topic for his end of year project,” Tom recalls. “He said ‘you’re doing all this cool stuff with computers and music, should we just make a few videos on how you do that?'”
Those videos were originally just for a college project, but when they uploaded them to YouTube, views started climbing immediately. This was early YouTube, before tutorial content dominated the platform. “That was when I went, ‘Okay, well, I guess I’m pivoting from being a musician into teaching music now,'” Tom explains.
Being one of the first creators making Ableton Live tutorials gave Tom a unique status in the community. “Just having that badge or status has helped fuel things whether I put out absolute weird chaotic experimental stuff or not,” he says. “I try to mix it up between actual good educational content and Tom’s just found a spider and he’s going to hook it up to something and make sounds out of it.”
That last part isn’t hyperbole. Tom has genuinely experimented with motion capture on spiders to generate sound, always ethically letting them go afterward. This willingness to tackle unconventional projects would eventually lead to the Orchid collaboration.
One recurring theme throughout Tom’s work is converting real-world data into music without traditional quantization. “I’ve always had a big passion for taking any data in the real world—could be the weather, could be stock markets, could be brain waves, could be a spider running around on my desk—and figuring out how I can convert that into something which produces nice audio,” Tom explains.
His brain wave experiments are particularly fascinating. For years, he built janky devices with wires, but recently received a Muse headset that slips comfortably over the head. “These types of devices don’t have as much resolution as something you would get in a research lab, but they’re definitely accurate enough for art,” he notes. “They can pick up relaxation, attention, fear sometimes, even nostalgia if you balance everything right.”
The creative process of finding what different brain wave bands and frequencies actually mean musically gives Tom a deep sense of wonderment. “I get a deep sense of excitement and mystery when I do this sort of work,” he says. This experimental approach—taking the impossible and giving it a really good go—became his calling card.
“I tend to get people who say ‘how did you find me?’ And they say ‘oh, we were asking all these people and they kept saying go and talk to Tom. That sounds like something Tom would do,'” he laughs. “If it seems impossible, I’ll give it a really good go, and that fills my cup.”
The Orchid story begins with an unusual flood of Instagram messages. “I was getting all these messages from teenagers in a period of a few hours saying ‘who are you? How do you know Kevin?'” Tom remembers. “I showed my partner and she’s like ‘they’re saying Kevin Parker. That’s Tame Impala.'”
Tom checked Tame Impala’s Instagram and discovered they’d just followed him. He reached out: “Hey, you just followed me. What’s up? Is there anything I can help you with?”
Kevin’s response was direct. “I’ve got this idea I’ve been brewing for years and years based off an old Casio I used to play. It’s just this chord machine.”
What followed was an iterative design process. Kevin sent MIDI effect bundles showing how he envisioned it working. Tom sent back Max adaptions. They drew things on paper. Eventually they had a software prototype working with a standard MIDI keyboard.
“Once we were happy, I went ‘okay, well, I’m more of a software guy, but I like building things,'” Tom says. He enlisted his friend Zach to help build what they call Prototype Zero—a perspex and aluminum contraption filled with terrible soldering, a Raspberry Pi, an Arduino, knobs, buttons, and hope.
“I sent that over to Kevin. I remember very specifically—I got a video from one of his friends, just him sitting quietly at a house party with a glass of wine, playing it with his eyes shut,” Tom recalls. “I just went ‘nailed it. That’s what I’m going for.'”
That moment proved the concept. Shortly after, they decided to scale up production.
Going from one hand-built prototype to thousands of production units required skills Tom had never developed. “I was like ‘wait, you want to make thousands of these? Okay.’ I don’t know how to do that, or I didn’t know how to do that.”
The team grew organically as people with the right expertise came on board. “Suddenly there’s a team and they’re all excellent at what they do, and I’m overseeing things. I’m used to working alone, so that phase as we grew towards the first drop was interesting.”
Tom found himself in situations he could never have predicted. “There’s this moment when I’m in the production line doing quality assurance stuff in China and I’m going ‘okay, yeah, I couldn’t have predicted this one.'”
Design expertise came from Ignasio from Moving Divine, who worked with Kevin to nail not just how Orchid looks, but how it vibes. “What does it feel like when it’s sitting on your coffee table?” Tom asks. “That kind of stuff is really important.”
The synth engine isn’t off-the-shelf either. “We got some really good coders in who could take my kind of janky code and turn it into really good stuff,” Tom explains. “We packed a really unique synth engine in there with three oscillator types—FM, subtractive, and our own analog modeled electric piano sound.”
One challenge was balancing depth with accessibility. Tom wanted extensive control. “I’m a synth head. I want to have attack, decay, filter, LFO, all of the parameters so people can just design sounds,” he admits.
But the creative team pushed back, prioritizing Orchid’s core concept—instant music idea generation. “The beauty of this is its compactness and simplicity,” Tom acknowledges. “Having it extend out with 50 other knobs is just going to overwhelm people.”
The final design features only nine encoders on the surface, keeping the interface minimal. For users who want deeper control, Orchid connects to software that provides complete synth engine access.
“If you’re a guitarist or vocalist in a band and you’re on the bus and you got an idea in your head, you don’t need access to the fine tuning of an LFO speed,” Tom explains. “You want to take it out of your bag, sit down, play it, put it back in your bag, go home, and develop it with your band.”
This philosophy extends to the entire user experience. Chord types are selected with buttons, then played across the keyboard. Octave controls function like a guitar capo. The register controls create inversions. Everything is designed for instant access without looking at the device.
After the first production drops, customer feedback became invaluable. A community Discord emerged organically within days of people receiving their Orchids. “I think he thought our lawyers were going to take it down,” Tom says of the community member who started it, “but I was like ‘wow, good on you, this is awesome.'”
The Discord became the primary hub for interaction between users and the Telepathic Instruments team. “We’ve got our support agents in there every day. I’m in there every other day interacting with people,” Tom says. “It’s not just ‘I have a problem, here is a solution.’ Our support person posts their own jams, makes their own little adapters out of Arduino if MIDI isn’t working into a device.”
Watching how users play Orchid reveals unexpected approaches. “Every day there’s 10 or 20 reels of people using it in wild fantastic ways,” Tom notes. “Seeing how they use it, we go ‘oh okay, this thing which we weren’t too sure about is actually being used differently by all of these people.'”
One unexpected discovery involved pops and clicks that occurred when switching between patches. The team was working on a fix when Tom visited the Telepathic studios in Fremont, Western Australia. “I walked into the room and someone was using that pop and crackle thing as a feature. He was making beats and ambient glitchy drone noises out of the pops and crackles, which was an artifact from us not having put a fix in place yet.”
This created a design dilemma. “Now it’s like, do we actually—are the pops and crackles part of the character of the thing?” Tom asks. “Do we have an options menu where you can turn them on or off?” They’ll likely be disabled by default, but Tom loves these kinds of creative problems. “I like things when they’ve got problems with them. It’s got some character.”
The intense focus on bringing Orchid to market meant putting personal music projects on pause. “People who follow me have probably noticed I haven’t put out any content or music in the last couple of years,” Tom admits. “It’s purely because I’m so hyperfocused on this.”
Initially, the inability to create personally frustrated him. “I’d almost say angry. I’m not an angry person, but I get a little bit like ‘ah, I’ve lost it, I can’t make music anymore,'” he recalls. “But it’s not that. Just pause for a bit. Get this big project that you’re loving and excited about out of the way, then you can pick it back up.”
Making that conscious decision brought relief. “Ideas that came into my head with music, I wouldn’t get annoyed because I think I couldn’t make them. I’m just like ‘cool, this is something I can do once I’ve got a couple of weeks spare down the line.'”
Tom’s approach to limited time changed too. “Knowing that I have that limitation has affected my ability to get into a flow state,” he explains. “I see these memes that make me feel seen where people have a meeting at midday, but they’ve got nothing on until midday, but the fact they’ve got a meeting at midday means they just potter around, they can’t really do anything.”
His solution? Keeping immediate-access instruments nearby. “I’ve got an Orchid on the corner of my bed and an Ableton Move sitting there as well. Instead of reaching for my phone at 10:00 at night, I’ll just reach over and turn it on. Cool, I’m playing a chord.”
One unexpected revelation was how creative problem solving activates similar mental states to music composition. “There were situations where some really fast creative thinking was needed to problem solve,” Tom explains. “That zone—I’ve got 24 hours to figure out how we can solve this really complex problem—I get the same sort of brain juice going on as when I’m writing really good music that I’m happy with.”
This connection makes sense given Tom’s analytical approach to music. “I like patterns, pattern recognition. I like splitting things up in my mind even if it’s completely wrong,” he says. This mindset, honed through years of jazz training where he focused on relationships and ratios rather than sight reading, translated directly to electronics work.
“It’s still just waveforms,” Tom notes. “The relationship of how resistors and capacitors work—I think I picked that up a little bit quicker than I would have if I hadn’t been so into the technicality of music.”
Recently, Time Magazine named Orchid one of the best music inventions of 2024. “That was a bit of a shock,” Tom admits. “Wonderful, but I still haven’t really processed that. We’ve been so busy getting this thing perfect and out to customers.”
The recognition hasn’t fully hit yet. “I’ve got quite a few things that I put on the shelf that I need to take a week and go ‘oh, something we made is in Time magazine.’ That’s kind of a thing.”
For Tom, who spent years creating experimental content and unconventional projects, mainstream recognition feels surreal. “Five years ago I was playing music at festivals and traveling around, just kind of didn’t really have much of a care in the world. Now I’m kind of, you know, Time Magazine. Interesting journey.”
The aesthetic choices behind Orchid weren’t arbitrary. Tom describes it as having a retro-futuristic quality—”how we thought the future was going to be in the 80s.” There’s intentional smoothness and rounding that contrasts with today’s angular, square designs.
The tactile experience matters deeply. “You can put one hand here and one hand here and then you can just look around,” Tom explains. “You can touch and feel everything. You don’t have to move your hands from their position at all. Takes a few sessions to know where everything is, but it’s a big part of it for me. It means you can shut your eyes as well.”
This design philosophy extends to portability. Unlike laptop-based production that keeps you tethered to screens, Orchid encourages taking music-making outside. “Being able to take a Move and the Orchid, I think they’re very complimentary things. Those two things and I can just go anywhere. Unless it’s raining, the world is completely open to creative ideas.”
Tom contrasts this with computer-based work. “I can’t sit at my computer in Ableton Live and just shut my eyes for two minutes while I’m designing a sound. Even just for the contrast—if you can go sit on a cliff or look at an ocean or get some grass under your feet—it does change things. You get some perspective on what you’re up to with your own journey.”
As firmware updates introduce new features, Tom remains conscious of changing users’ learned behaviors. “It’s kind of like you learn it like a piano or a guitar,” he explains. “When it comes to a point where something’s going to change, I think we should keep the legacy version and have it as a rollbackable user-definable option.”
Many upcoming features focus on customization. For example, when playing chord extensions like adding a sixth or ninth, users have different preferences. “Do you want that six to come in the next time you push the note, or do you want it to come in when you push the note, or do you want it to play just that extension?” Tom asks. “There’s like three different things there and they quite drastically change depending on how people like to work.”
Some users treat chords like finger drums, retriggering with each press. Others prefer queuing up chords and only changing when they hit a new note. “Sometimes it’s really fun hitting that chord like a finger drum, but some people want to cue their chord up and when they play the next one it’s ready because they want to find their position.”
Watching the community reveals unexpected creative uses. Beyond the pops and clicks as percussion, Tom discovered another quirk. “There’s one synth patch where if you play the right chord and the right note, something about the synth engine, the maths all lines up in a certain way where you suddenly just get a completely different sound,” he says. “We’re looking at spectrograms going, how is this happening? It’s almost like an Easter egg. We can fix it, but no one’s found it and complained about it yet.”
This echoes the character of vintage instruments where limitations became features. Tom draws a parallel to Ableton’s reverb: “On the size control, when you turn that it makes kind of these funny noises. They’ve updated it so you have a dropdown menu, but the old way—which can be kind of fun sometimes—if you put another reverb after it, weird things start happening.”
These “problems” often come down to zero-crossing issues. “Do you want to instantly have your result or do you want a very small envelope? That very small envelope, especially when you’ve got transients like kick drums and hats and snares, can actually completely dull and take away the impact,” Tom explains. “There’s nothing more anxiety-inducing than hearing a delay start getting out of hand and you don’t know where it is in your project.”
With Orchid’s production stabilized, Tom sees creative time returning. “Free time has come pretty much this week. I’ve got a taste of it at least,” he says. His computer holds approximately 80 unfinished tracks, with 10 of them 98% complete. “I think the first thing I’ll do is spend a day going through that being like ‘oh yeah, this one.'”
He’s also planning to catch up on Ableton Live features he’s missed. “I think Live 12 was the last version I really used producing. I know there’s only two or three major versions, but Ableton will really cram in some epic things in those minor versions.”
Tom’s considering a livestream where viewers teach him what’s new. “I think it’ll be fun. It’s like, okay, I’m rusty. I haven’t been paying attention. I’m going to jump in blind and you lot teach me what I’ve missed.”
Despite the hiatus from personal projects, Tom emphasizes he loved the Orchid journey. “I don’t want to say the stuff I’ve been doing hasn’t been an enjoyable part of my life. I absolutely love what I’m doing with Telepathic Instruments. I’m so passionate about it. I’m happy. It’s just awesome.”
Tom’s strategy for fighting phone scrolling involves strategic instrument placement. “I’ll be in my room and it’s kind of turned into this place where you can lie on the bed and scroll on your phone. I’m kind of going, I don’t know if I like this.”
His solution? “I’ve got an Orchid on the corner of my bed and an Ableton Move sitting there. Just trying to, instead of reaching for my phone, just reach over and turn it on. I don’t know if it’s working yet. It’s a very new thing.”
This approach addresses the modern creative challenge—instant gratification from phones versus the delayed gratification of traditional music-making. “When I started playing guitar, I was 14, it’s the 90s, there’s nothing else to do. So you suffer through it,” Tom’s interviewer Brian Funk notes. “I don’t know if today with phones and the internet I would make it through those stages.”
Instruments like Orchid bridge that gap. “Something like this where you can sound like ‘I’m making music already’ gets you in quick,” Brian observes. Tom agrees, though he’s personally still working on breaking the phone habit. “I’m definitely looking for new ways to get back into writing music in my downtime.”
Tom hints at more instruments coming. “We’re definitely going to build some more things. That’s for sure,” he says. The Telepathic Instruments Discord continues growing, becoming what Tom calls “one of the least toxic communities I’ve ever been part of on the internet. It’s just a really good wholesome place.”
He encourages people to join even without owning an Orchid. “Even if you don’t own one, come and talk music with us and get involved.”
The journey from accidental YouTuber to instrument designer represents an unconventional career path that didn’t exist when Tom was younger. “This career path, you wouldn’t have been able to pick that in high school as your path,” Brian notes. “I want to go on this new thing called YouTube and take it from there.”
Tom reflects on explaining his work over the years. “There were 10 years there where I don’t think anybody including myself knew what I was actually doing.” Now, with Time Magazine recognition and a thriving product, the path makes more sense—though where it leads next remains open.
“I have no idea what’s next either,” Tom admits. But if his track record suggests anything, it’ll probably involve impossible-seeming projects, unconventional data sources, and creative solutions that no one else thinks to try.
Tom Cosm’s journey from bedroom producer to co-founder of a Time Magazine-recognized music tech company illustrates what happens when you consistently tackle projects others avoid. His willingness to experiment with brain waves, spiders, and unconventional sound sources built exactly the skillset needed to bring Kevin Parker’s vision to life.
Orchid represents more than just a chord generator. It’s the culmination of years spent understanding how to translate complex ideas into accessible tools, how to balance depth with simplicity, and how to design instruments that invite play rather than study.
For producers feeling overwhelmed by choice or intimidated by technical complexity, Tom’s philosophy offers guidance: embrace constraints, trust happy accidents, and remember that sometimes the fastest path to creativity is the one that gets you making sounds immediately.
The Discord community, the iterative design process, and Tom’s openness about challenges all point to a different way of building music technology—one that values user experience and creative flow over feature checklists and spec sheet battles.
Whether you’re curious about Orchid specifically or just interested in how innovative music tools get made, Tom’s story proves that the intersection of technical skill, creative vision, and willingness to attempt the impossible creates opportunities that didn’t exist before you started.
Want to explore more innovative Ableton workflows and creative tools? Check out these related posts:
Create Electro Track from Photo using Photomat & Data Synth – Transform visual data into musical ideas with experimental Ableton techniques
Monomono Maya Synthesizer for Push 3 – Discover powerful standalone synthesis perfect for immediate music creation
Basslines with Ableton Move – Learn portable production techniques that complement chord-based composition workflows
A lush, expressive Max for Live synth with Juno-style tones, MPE support, and Push 3 standalone compatibility — meet Monomono...
Darren E Cowley (Admin)
Introducing moon.hands.core – A New Way to Automate & Perform in Ableton Live We’re excited to announce the release of mo...
Darren E Cowley (Admin)
