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.
One thing I hadn’t explored yet on the Roland Juno-106 is how well it produces synthesizer effects. This is the sort of sound that I would normally create using my Sequencial Circuits Pro-One, and admittedly the filter on the Pro-One is a little more agressive, but I decided to give it a go on the 106. This sound was made using the filter self-resonance discussed in detail in the article Eerie Pseudo Oscillator Microtrack. Using the LFO on the VCF creates the wobble, then I adjusted the LFO manually for speed modulation.
I found this synthetic guitar-like sound on my Roland Juno-106, tweaked it a little bit, and then ran it through some delay and reverb. The envelope gives it a similar sound to an electric guitar played clean. If I wanted it to sound more realistic I would stagger the attacks and perhaps distort the signal, but I like the synthetic nature of it. If I wanted a realistic guitar, then I’d record some guitar. Imitating acoustic or even most electro-mechanical instruments with synthesizers is something that was a necessary step in the evolution of synthesis and modeling. These days we appreciate how synthesis sounds apart from the modeling and reproduction of traditional instrumentation.
I created this microtrack from a tiny sample of a chord played on my Casio CZ-1000. I looped the chord and then ran it through a effect chain with five plugins, including Ableton Resonators, MDA DubDelay, Auto Pan, Chorus, and Reverb. I automated several parameters such as the delay feedback and tone.
