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.

Chromatic Textures Shown at 6X6 #5: Mystery

Posted on July 8, 2010 by John CS Keston

On Wednesday, July 7, 2010 my piece Chromatic Textures was shown at 6X6 #5: Mystery, an exhibition at Ciné Lab in Athens, Georgia. My work was accepted along with five other artists, “…including Denton Crawford’s eyeballs, Aaron Oldenburg’s plunge into asphyxia, and a performance streamed live over the Internet from California.” Here’s my abstract for Chromatic Textures.

Chromatic Textures is a study on the synesthetic nature of our senses of sound and sight. Video input is used to produce generative musical phrases. The visual media is analyzed by the GMS (Gestural Music Sequencer) to create the musical forms in real-time. The software includes adjustable probability distribution maps for the scale and rhythm. Adjusting these settings allows familiar structures to emerge. The settings chosen for this piece cause notes within a particular scale to play more frequently, however, it is still possible for any note within the twelve-tone chromatic system to occur. As a result, dissonant or blue notes can be heard at rare instances throughout the piece.
Continue reading →

Experimental Music Mondays Part 5

Posted on June 26, 2010 by John CS Keston

The June 28 installment of Experimental Music Mondays starts out with music from EMM regular Terr the Om (Nathan Brende). Terr the Om combines circuit bending and laptop mangling to create glistening, quirky, and bit-crushed on-the-spot compositions with a break beat sensibility.

Next is Siamese Bug made up of drummer TIm Glenn and guitarist Jeremy Ylversaker. Tim Glenn (HeatdeatH, Squidfist) and Jeremy Ylvisaker (Alpha Consumer, Dosh, Andrew Bird) have played together in Fog and Ourmine, Individually they’ve performed everywhere from Sydney Opera Hall to your nightmares. Expect to hear the sounds from contact mics on torn cymbals and vintage transistor interference through guitar pickups and pedal arrays.

The final act of the evening is by noise masters Juhyo. “JUHYO is a collaboration between Minneapolis artists Brian Kopish (Surrounded) and Bill Henson (Oblong Box). Together they create horrifyingly beautiful soundscapes of pure noise. Armed with an array of homemade oscillators, delay units, resonators, samplers and sheer volume; aimed with composition, discipline and conscious, focused intent; JUHYO exists as an entity of creative expression, freedom, subtle beauty and eardrum bleeding power.”

Monophonic Step Sequencer Max for Live Device

Posted on June 23, 2010 by John CS Keston

I have converted a Max patch I build into a Max for Live device as an exercise for learning M4L. The original patch is a monophonic step sequencer that I wrote about in Step Sequencer Built in MaxMSP. I ran into some difficulties converting the patch along the way. Although it worked perfectly in Live, for some reason it was causing Live to crash after saving. It was also not storing the values in the Live number boxes, drop-downs, and sliders. The problem went away when I went through the tedious process of recreating the patch rather than copying and pasting my original work. This is a little worrisome since the next conversion will not be so simple (Multitouch Rotary Dial and X-Y Granular Exploration). Here’s an audio example with a little reverb to give you an idea of what it does.

M4L StepSequencer

GMS on CreativeApplications.net

Posted on June 18, 2010 by John CS Keston

CreativeApplications.net has posted an article about the GMS. If you’re not familar, CreativeApplications.net (CAN) is a blog founded by Filip Visnjic. From the CAN about page:

Aim of CreativeApplications.Net is to bring together applications that challenge the ways how we share and engage with information. By scouting the web, CAN brings you best in creative app development and thinking. CreativeApplications.Net is platform independent. We look at OSX, Windows, Linux, iPhone, Web Apps, Flash, Physical Interfaces, Max MSP development, Processing and many others.

Filip was a speaker at Flashbelt 2010. During his presentation he showed a variety of fascinating work by his students and more featured on CAN. I was lucky enough to introduce him at the conference and experience his session. Checkout CreativeApplications.net for more.

André Michelle at Flashbelt 2010

Posted on June 17, 2010 by John CS Keston

Yesterday I had the distinct pleasure of introducing André Michelle at the Flashbelt conference in Minneapolis. André is the lead developer of Audiotool. If you’re not familiar with Audiotool it is, in my view, the best web based audio production application I have ever seen. The bulk of André’s presentation involved showing Flash built demos of advanced audio functionality, like granular synthesis, guitar modeling, and using physical modeling to influence sounds and sequences.

Toward the end of his presentation he brought Audiotool into the mix. Audiotool is an application built in Flash. The nearest thing I could compare it to is Reason. The biggest difference is that it runs on the web. This allows for social media opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise be possible. Instruments built into Audiotool, include very convincing emulation of several popular Roland devices, like the TR-808 and the TB-303. It also includes a modular synth called Pulverisateur and a number of effect processors.

Finally, there is an audio track module that allows you to bring in samples stored within a pretty big library provided by Loopmasters. You can’t bring in your own samples yet, but André assured us it was in the works.

André played me a few examples of some of his favorite user generated tracks from Audiotool and I was very impressed with the sound quality and scope. It’s easy to dismiss a web based audio application as a novelty, but the community around it is creating some totally professional sounding stuff that can’t be ignored.