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.
Today’s One Synthesizer Sound Every Day involves using the arpeggiator built into Ableton Live. The arpeggiator, found under MIDI Effects, is a pretty simple tool, there are the usual up, down, up/down patterns as well as random, random once (repeats a random pattern), and random other (doesn’t play the same note twice).
This one minute and fifty second microtrack is composed of two layers of arpeggios created by routing Ableton’s arpeggiator to my newly restored Roland Juno-106. I added some filtered tempo delay and mixed in some reverb on the fade out to polish it off. I wish I had a piece of hardware that did exactly what Ableton’s Arpeggiator does (perhaps with the addition of a tap tempo button). In fact I started a discussion about this on the Electronic Musicians Network, a Facebook group started by my friend Robert Luna. Friend me, then message me there if you’d like to participate in the group. I’ll write an article soon compiling my research into dedicated hardware arpeggiators and hardware sequencers. Here are the arpeggios combined.
Here’s another excerpt from the glitches that I recorded while the voice chip was failing on my Roland Juno-106. In this section I was just holding a note without touching any other controls, so all the variations in the sound were caused by the autonomous shorting that was going on inside the faulty 80017a voice chip.
As I mentioned in my last article, I was quite disappointed that my Juno-106 arrived with a bad 80017a voice chip, not to mention a laundry list of other technical and cosmetic problems. However, in some ways I enjoyed the challenge of getting it back in working order. All the research, soldering, and fussing with the electronics was kind of rewarding in the long run.
Another thing I wanted to explore were the glitches I could get out of it while the voice chip was bad. So, I recorded 20 minutes of crackly, warbled, weirdness while adjusting sliders and pressing buttons. I’ll be sharing more bits and pieces of this in upcoming articles. For now, here’s an excerpt of glitches from the first few seconds of my experimentation.
Back in November I wrote an article titled What is Your Favorite Poly Synth? discussing mostly vintage polyphonic synthesizers. One of them that kept coming up was the Roland Juno-106. Researching these popular synths, I found that they are fairly easy to come by, and usually reasonably priced. I found a great deal on one and snapped it up only to discover that it had the dreaded voice chip problem. Fortunately the seller agreed to refund part of the purchase price to help pay for the repairs. Six weeks later I have finally got it up and running, but it took some doing. Read on for more, and the the synth sound of the day.
This microtrack was made with a D-50 factory preset called Twilight Zone. The D-50 is quite capable of generating sophisticated special effects. Still looking for a PG-1000, but might start using some librarian software specifically designed for the D-50 to at least be able to use a mouse or track pad to program patches.
Today’s One Synthesizer Sound Every Day involves using the arpeggiator built into Ableton Live. The arpeggiator, found under MIDI Effects, is a pretty simple tool, there are the usual up, down, up/down patterns as well as random, random once (repeats a random pattern), and random other (doesn’t play the same note twice). 
As I mentioned in my last article, I was quite disappointed that my Juno-106 arrived with a bad 80017a voice chip, not to mention a laundry list of other technical and cosmetic problems. However, in some ways I enjoyed the challenge of getting it back in working order. All the research, soldering, and fussing with the electronics was kind of rewarding in the long run. 