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.

Synthesizer Noise Jam #2

Posted on February 22, 2011 by John CS Keston

Here’s another segment from the noise experiments I produced using the Roland MKS-80. I’m enjoying the sound of the triangle wav setting on the LFO that you can hear at the end.

Noise Jam Segment 2

Synthesizer Noise Jam #1

Posted on February 21, 2011 by John CS Keston

I have been recording a series of solo noise jams using the Roland Super Jupiter MKS-80 while in the process of researching repairs. The unit currently cannot be tuned and does not respond to keyboard velocity information. This does not prevent me from exploring what the instrument can do sonically, without depending on traditional scales, or harmony. This sort of experimentation is usually done with modular synthesizers, or instruments that have most of the parameters available as tactile controls. In other words, to do this on an MKS-80 you need the MPG-80 programmer, or a viable alternative.

As far as physical controllers go, the CME Bitstream 3X seems to be one that a lot of MKS-80 users are talking about. It looks like a pretty good controller for a lot of things, but once again, it’s a little on the expensive side of things. I opted to use the reKon editor as a plugin and map MIDI controls to it as I described in reKon Audio VST-AU MKS-80 Editor. This worked great, with no noticeable latency. Here’s a segment from the first experiment in this series.

Noise Jam Segment

reKon Audio VST-AU MKS-80 Editor

Posted on February 20, 2011 by John CS Keston

If you know anything about the Roland Super Jupiter MKS-80 you know that it’s glacially slow to program the beast without using the Roland MPG-80 programmer. That’s all well and good, but the MPG-80s are pretty hard to come by and if you do find one you might have to sell a kidney to pay for it.

That’s where the reKon Audio VST-AU MKS-80 editor comes in. It’s a software editor for Mac and Windows that has an interface modeled after the MPG-80. It’s got all the real-time controls that the MPG-80 has, plus a patch librarian, randomizer, and more. What I have found most useful is the ability to run it as a plugin.

In Ableton Live I was able to save the patch data with the set. I also mapped many of the controls in the editor to sliders and knobs on a MIDI controller. In the process of setting this up, I thought that there would surely be noticeable latency going from the MIDI controller to the reKon plugin, then to the MIDI out, and back into the MKS-80, but it was fast and fluid. I did notice some minor aliasing when sweeping the filter, but I got the same result when I made the adjustments directly on the MKS-80.

Here’s a mono lead sound that I programmed using this technique. Please pardon the self indulgent playing, but I’m pretty pleased with this patch and it was a breeze to program with the reKon plugin. I’m also impressed with the quality of the MKS-80 VCOs over a broad frequency range. With sampled and modeled waveforms you often end up hearing artifacts or undertones in the high frequencies. Not so with this beast.

Self Indulgent Synth Solo

CZ1000 Strings Lifted from Live Set at Short Circuit

Posted on February 19, 2011 by John CS Keston

I isolated this string sound from my Ostraka set tonight at Short Circuit, “a monthly show set up to show case local and out of state electronic music artists” – from the Short Circuit Facebook Page. Tonight the line-up included WEb DiMension, Sputnik Viper, Square Wail, and Ostraka.

Casio CZ1000 Strings

Roland Super Jupiter MKS-80 Rev 4 Versus Rev 5

Posted on February 18, 2011 by John CS Keston

There’s quite a debate out there on the internets about the sound of the Roland Super Jupiter MKS-80 rev 4 versus rev 5. The one I’m testing at the moment is a rev 5. So I decided to see if I could match one of the rev 4 comparison sounds that I found posted on Gearslutz.com in this thread about the topic. I knew that I couldn’t match it exactly because on the unit I’m testing the tune knob isn’t functional and it does not respond to velocity. However, I thought it would be interesting to see how close I could come.

I tuned the instrument, awkwardly, with the pitch wheel in lieu of a functional tune knob. The main difference I hear is that in the rev 4 example the velocity is routed to the VCF, where in my example the VCF is re-triggered with the same intensity on each note since the velocity is not functional. Here are the examples so that you can be the judge. Compare the first phrase in “Rev 4 versus Rev 5” to “Rev 5 Reprogrammed”.

Rev 4 versus Rev 5 example from Gearslutz.com moderator Don Solaris:
Rev 4 versus Rev 5