About John CS Keston
John CS Keston is an award winning transdisciplinary artist reimagining how music, video art, and computer science intersect. His work both questions and embraces his backgrounds in music technology, software development, and improvisation leading him toward unconventional compositions that convey a spirit of discovery and exploration through the use of graphic scores, chance and generative techniques, analog and digital synthesis, experimental sound design, signal processing, and acoustic piano. Performers are empowered to use their phonomnesis, or sonic imaginations, while contributing to his collaborative work. Originally from the United Kingdom, John currently resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota where he is a professor of Digital Media Arts at the University of St Thomas. He founded the sound design resource, AudioCookbook.org, where you will find articles and documentation about his projects and research.
John has spoken, performed, or exhibited original work at New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME 2022), the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC 2022), the International Digital Media Arts Conference (iDMAa 2022), International Sound in Science Technology and the Arts (ISSTA 2017-2019), Northern Spark (2011-2017), the Weisman Art Museum, the Montreal Jazz Festival, the Walker Art Center, the Minnesota Institute of Art, the Eyeo Festival, INST-INT, Echofluxx (Prague), and Moogfest. He produced and performed in the piece Instant Cinema: Teleportation Platform X, a featured project at Northern Spark 2013. He composed and performed the music for In Habit: Life in Patterns (2012) and Words to Dead Lips (2011) in collaboration with the dance company Aniccha Arts. In 2017 he was commissioned by the Walker Art Center to compose music for former Merce Cunningham dancers during the Common Time performance series. His music appears in The Jeffrey Dahmer Files (2012) and he composed the music for the short Familiar Pavement (2015). He has appeared on more than a dozen albums including two solo albums on UnearthedMusic.com.
I commute by bicycle daily and cycle for fun often as well, so I have lots of bike parts lying around that I should probably throw away. About a month ago I was hit by a car in the bike lane, but came out relatively unscathed. A few days later I realized my handlebars were slightly bent in the accident. After replacing them I decided to record some sounds I was making with the old ones. I chopped out the best samples and put them into an instrument so I could play them with a controller. I messed about with that for a little while then, just for fun, ran it through a long reverb. Here are the preliminary results.
I really like this one.
nice! what reverb are you using?
Thanks Jeff and Paul. I ran it through Ableton’s standard reverb. I turned off the input processing. By default a high cut filter is enabled, but I wanted the breathy quality to come through. I also extended the decay time to 5.45 seconds and dry/wet to 45%.
I’m seriously impressed by how interesting and dynamic these sounds are… from an old set of handle bars. I’m assuming you blew across one of the holes to get the tones out. Great character to these sounds. Love this site by the way. Thanks for tinkering in public.