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.

Traversing Samples with Granular Synthesis

Posted on October 12, 2009 by John CS Keston

messy_patch I have begun to refine the patch I described in the last entry, creating an instrument that allows you to traverse through samples using an x-y controller and a slider. The x axis controls the forward or backward playback frequency of the grain. The y axis controls the width of the grain; either very narrow (minimum of 10ms), to an adjustable percentage of the sample at the widest (15% by default). The slider controls the position of the grain in the sample. Buttons across the top allow you to choose one of five preset samples. Alternatives can be loaded in the patch or set as defaults.

So far the TouchOSC controller is working quite well for the project. It was a bit tricky getting the interface to reflect changes in the patch, since radio button behavior is not supported in TouchOSC. Fortunately it supports an input port, so I managed to get all the buttons toggled properly by sending data back to the iPod Touch. I have connected the accelerometer to a filter so that when turned on with a toggle, tilting it on the y axis causes a lowpass filter to effect the output. Finally, by setting a threshold on the z axis, giving the iPod Touch a brisk shake will cause the patch to loop a randomly selected grain of random length from a randomly selected buffer played back at a randomly selected rate. The variety of sounds possible with five short samples is huge. Here’s a selection of sound produced with one sample selected. The sound source is from a vintage video game. I’m curious to see if anyone can recognize it. Please post your guess in a comment.

Etude in 8 Bits for Multitouch Graintable Synthesis

TouchOSC Controlled Glitch Looper in MaxMSP

Posted on October 6, 2009 by John CS Keston

Custom TouchOSC Layout I don’t have this patch ready to share yet, but I thought I could at least explain a little bit about it and offer an audio example. What I’m working on is a device to manipulate samples in unconventional ways using alternative input methods. This audio clip, for example, was generated using a Max patch that adjusts the playback frequency and length of a sample using an x-y controller. The x-axis controls the frequency while the y-axis controls the sample length. For a controller I used an iPod Touch running TouchOSC. I’ve been using Mrmr as well, but wanted to try TouchOSC now that it has an editor to create custom layouts.

My goal is to create several pages in TouchOSC that allow you to manipulate one of five samples in several different ways. The image is a shot of my iPod Touch displaying the custom layout that I created and connected to my Max patch for creating the sound linked below.

Mad Looper

A Glorious Dawn

Posted on September 28, 2009 by John CS Keston

This has clearly been making the rounds, so it’s likely that you’ve already had the pleasure, but I can’t resist linking it to it here.

The piece features video and auto-tuned dialog of Carl Sagan from his amazing series, Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, mashed-up into a melancholy, downtempo, new-age, retro music video with just enough (or perhaps not enough) tongue in cheek. Finally, auto-tune use to be proud of!

The piece was produced by John Boswell. More about him and his music is available on his site. He has also made a download of the track and the video available here.

Monophonic Step Sequencer Max Patch Download

Posted on September 26, 2009 by John CS Keston

Here’s an archive that contains the patch and a standalone application (Mac OSX only) of the step sequencer that I built in MaxMSP a few days ago. The sequencer works pretty well sending MIDI, but I haven’t really fine tuned the internal synthesis. Currently it uses a function object with an adjustable domain to adjust the amplitude envelope of a sinusoidal, but if the note length (function domain) is either too short or too long, clicks occur between notes. What I need to do is ramp up or down to the proper level for each new note. I’ll post an update here when I come up with a solution. If any Max veterans out there have any suggestions, please feel free to post a comment.

MonoStepSequencer.zip

MAW Media Mash-up at the WBSC

Posted on September 25, 2009 by John CS Keston

Earlier this month I shared an excerpt of music from a performance at a recent Minneapolis Art on Wheels exhibition. MAW artist, Andrea Steudel, did some excellent video documentation that highlights the artwork and sound that transpired at the event.

The audio quality is quite good, considering the conditions in the space, and goes a long way to illustrate the ambiance during the night. Please enjoy the video and checkout the original post at http://minneapolisartonwheels.org/content/media-mash-wbsc.