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 am currently borrowing a Roland Super Jupiter MKS-80 with the option to buy. This is the first time I have been able to experiment with one of these instruments. Unfortunately this one has some technical problems. First of all the tuning knob doesn’t work. The potentiometer looks fine and moves smoothly, but the pitch doesn’t change and it’s always about a quarter tone flat as if the tune knob was all the way to the left. Secondly, the unit does not respond to velocity. This might be due to a bad dynamics sensitivity slider, which is visibly bent. Finally the memory area switch is not working consistently. When set to the internal memory, the unit responds with the message “INSERT CARTRIDGE” when trying to change patches and no cartridge is available. Fortunately I have been able to intermittently coax it into patch changes with a MIDI controller. Other than being out of tune and not responding dynamically it sounds great. I have recorded lots of examples, unfortunately they are all out of key, so I can’t use them for anything official, but it’s giving me a good idea about what the instrument is capable of. I made this two part microtrack with a couple of presets already programmed into the MKS-80.
One thing that I think we don’t do enough is record amplified synthesis with microphones. I must admit to recording an unhealthy portion of my work direct. There’s a reason. It’s much easier. It’s clean. It’s fast. But some really great qualities can be achieved by going the extra mile. Some of my favorite sounds were made by plugging my Pro-One into my Leslie cabinet and using the motor speed for expression. During our cymatics tests last week I recorded some of the sounds made by the oscillators, and the agitated granules with my PCM-D50 and my mobile phone. Here’s a combination of those sounds layered into an ambient microtrack.
Here one more short video from our cymatics experiments last Friday. This time a the audio is agitating long grain rice on a one eighth inch think plywood platform.
Getting these mustard seeds to scatter and converge in this cymatics test took tuning the cycle~ object in Max to around 73 Hertz. The spherical shape of this material lends itself well to this sort of experiment. The next time we attempt this we will be using a more controlled environment with a leveled, more sensitive membrane between the speaker and the seeds or grains.
Today’s synthesizer sound is contained within the video above and includes the acoustic sound of rice grains bouncing on a speaker cone. The tone was generated by the cycle~ object in MaxMSP and set to a frequency of somewhere around 156 Hertz.
