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.
Unearthed Music has made all of Precambrian Resonance available as full-length 128kbps MP3 previews on Unearthed Music. The entire album is also streaming on last.fm. Here’s track eight, Hamamatsu No. G210. You might remember a rough mix of it from an earlier entry, which revealed how the title came about, and mentioned a release date of March 24, 2009. So, technically I’m four months late on this project. Although negotiating postponement was not an issue, since I’m a label partner. In any case, it’s done and I’m happy with the results.
Recently I have been endowed with a fortunate amount of new gear. After upgrading to Ableton Suite 8 it became apparent that my first-gen MacBook Pro was not going to pull the plough. So I have upgraded to the latest model. I have yet to put 8 through its paces to see how well it performs on the new machine, but I have found some time to get it installed and play around a bit.
This audio experiment is a result of that. It consists of a patch I created using the MDA JX-10 emulator. I did little to process it other than some delay, but I used a Korg nanoKONTROL to control the filter and volume of the device. Before I attached the controller I was playing with the filter using the track pad on the Mac. When I wasn’t getting the control I wanted I hooked up the nanoKONTROL and felt a bit more confident manipulating the cutoff and resonance with knobs.
Lately I’ve been experimenting with iPod Touch applications for recording sound. Generally it’s necessary to use a headset to make a recording, but my goal is to figure out a practical way to bypass the headset with an input for a high quality microphone. While unsuccessfully testing my Audio Technica AT822 stereo mic as an input for the iPod Touch I captured an interesting glitch within the application I was testing.
The low frequency waveform (shown in the image at the left) played at regular intervals while I had the microphone attached. Perhaps it’s some sort of communication protocol for headset controls. I removed the DC offset, but otherwise left it as it was. Perhaps I’ll try playing it back at some higher frequencies to see it’s useful for anything musically.
After upgrading my G4 to Safari 4.0.2 today, my M-Audio 2496 PCI bus internal sound card started making this horrible sound anytime audio was played on it. My first instinct was to capture the sound so I plugged a cable into my laptop and grabbed a few seconds of it in Audacity. Listen at your own risk. It’s loud and unpleasant, but somehow fun and delightful (reminding me of someone I once dated in the past). Fortunately after reinstalling the drivers it started behaving properly again (unfortunately this technique doesn’t work on partners).
It’s been a while since I have gone crazy applying layers and layers of mad processing to a chunk of sound just to hear what happens, but tonight I was demonstrating signal processing to my audio production class, which gave me an excuse to let loose and over process something into oblivion. I started with a one bar loop that I ripped to a .wav using iTunes, then applied reverse and pitch shifting with and without time correction. I topped it off with reverb and delay to meet the requirements of the exercise.
Unearthed Music has made all of Precambrian Resonance available as full-length 128kbps MP3 previews on Unearthed Music. The entire album is also streaming on last.fm. Here’s track eight, Hamamatsu No. G210. You might remember a rough mix of it from an earlier entry, which revealed how the title came about, and mentioned a release date of March 24, 2009. So, technically I’m four months late on this project. Although negotiating postponement was not an issue, since I’m a label partner. In any case, it’s done and I’m happy with the results.
Recently I have been endowed with a fortunate amount of new gear. After upgrading to 
Lately I’ve been experimenting with iPod Touch applications for recording sound. Generally it’s necessary to use a headset to make a recording, but my goal is to figure out a practical way to bypass the headset with an input for a high quality microphone. While unsuccessfully testing my Audio Technica AT822 stereo mic as an input for the iPod Touch I captured an interesting glitch within the application I was testing. 
After upgrading my G4 to Safari 4.0.2 today, my M-Audio 2496 PCI bus internal sound card started making this horrible sound anytime audio was played on it. My first instinct was to capture the sound so I plugged a cable into my laptop and grabbed a few seconds of it in Audacity. Listen at your own risk. It’s loud and unpleasant, but somehow fun and delightful (reminding me of someone I once dated in the past). Fortunately after reinstalling the drivers it started behaving properly again (unfortunately this technique doesn’t work on partners). 
It’s been a while since I have gone crazy applying layers and layers of mad processing to a chunk of sound just to hear what happens, but tonight I was demonstrating signal processing to my audio production class, which gave me an excuse to let loose and over process something into oblivion. I started with a one bar loop that I ripped to a .wav using iTunes, then applied reverse and pitch shifting with and without time correction. I topped it off with reverb and delay to meet the requirements of the exercise.