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 created the following generative sequence using GMS (click for details), during a solo performance at the Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Art, October 2010. One of the virtual instruments I used in the set is an Open Source, Roland Super JX10 emulator made by MDA. The Roland Super JX10 was one of the last great analog poly-synths produced by Roland, and the first Roland synth to receive velocity and aftertouch treatment on the 76 key keyboard. Although I never owned one of these, I have played one before, and I imagine that programming them was brain surgery without the optional PG-800 programmer. In the documentation for the MDA JX10 they state, “[this] plug-in is designed for high quality (lower aliasing than most soft synths) and low processor usage – this means that some features that would increase CPU load have been left out”. To me this plugin sounds very good. I’d like to hear from anyone who owns or has played a Roland Super JX10 for their perspective on this instrument.
Here’s a sound I coaxed out of the Korg Monotron during my live set at Nick and Eddie Thursday Funhouse that I mentioned in the last article. One again, you can download the entire set here. In my previous demos of the Monotron I used no processing, so this time I decided to present it exactly as it was performed in the live set, through stereo delay and reverb sends. The sound of this minute instrument never ceases to amaze me.
Here’s a sound I produced during a live set at Nick and Eddie for the Thursday Funhouse series under my Ostraka moniker. You can download the entire set that I released as a holiday gift last month. I used Grain Machine which is a touch based granular synthesis instrument that I developed in Max for Live to create the sound. Grain Machine requires a device running TouchOSC such as an iPhone, iPod Touch, or Android device for the touch based control. There’s a rotary wheel with friction modeling, and an x-y pad for granular exploration.
Here’s a test composition using another patch I created for Curve titled Auto Octave Filter Sweep by AudioCookbook. On this patch I used two of the LFOs. The first one I setup to alternate between the octaves with a square wave, and the second I used with a sign wave to modulate the cutoff frequency on the filter configured with a 24dB low pass filter. On the second LFO I used the fixed rate that ranges from 0.020 hertz all the way up to 5.24 kilohertz. I mapped a MIDI controller to the LFO speed and adjusted it over the full range during the sequence. I also made adjustment to the cutoff frequency, resonance, and envelopes during the 5:20 minute recording.
Cableguys.de have recently released an excellent community-driven software synthesizer called Curve (downloadable demo available). The synth has three, aliasing-free oscillators, three five stage envelopes, two filters each with ten modes, and four LFOs that are either, beat, note, or frequency synced. One of the coolest things you can do is draw your waveforms in the editor. You can even randomize them for some interesting results. Here’s a sequence that I created and recorded without any processing using Curve. This is one of my first attempts at creating a patch in Curve and I shared it to the preset community (available within Curve’s interface) as Bouncy Arpeggiator by AudioCookbook. Stay tuned for a lot more from this powerful and great sounding software synth.
I created the following generative sequence using GMS (click for details), during a solo performance at the Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Art, October 2010. One of the virtual instruments I used in the set is an Open Source, Roland Super JX10 emulator made by MDA. The Roland Super JX10 was one of the last great analog poly-synths produced by Roland, and the first Roland synth to receive velocity and aftertouch treatment on the 76 key keyboard. Although I never owned one of these, I have played one before, and I imagine that programming them was brain surgery without the optional PG-800 programmer. In the documentation for the MDA JX10 they state, “[this] plug-in is designed for high quality (lower aliasing than most soft synths) and low processor usage – this means that some features that would increase CPU load have been left out”. To me this plugin sounds very good. I’d like to hear from anyone who owns or has played a Roland Super JX10 for their perspective on this instrument. 
