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.
The sound of the water going over this section of the Coon Rapids dam across the Mississippi river about fifteen miles North of Minneapolis, was deafening. Virtually all other sound within the environment was drowned (no pun intended) out by the fierce white water noise. I made a recording that is about a minute and a half long. Here’s about thirty seconds of it, but my questions is what would one use this sort of sound for, other than water over a dam sound effects?
After checking out a few bands during the Heliotrope festival at the Ritz Theater in Northeast Minneapolis, I starting riding home as a light rain began to fall. It was about 1:07am. Halfway home I heard church bells. Loud, cacophonous, church bells. Not what you’d expect to hear at that time. I dug my recorder out of my bag and started cycling quickly toward the sound. There are churches (plural) on almost every block in my neighborhood, but it didn’t take long to find the one making all the racket. I stopped in the middle of the street and recorded the ringing for more than six minutes. There’s a lot more to this story, but for now, here’s one minute and sixteen seconds of what I captured.
Here’s another segment of our recent session that highlights a bit more of Graham’s drumming. In addition to his great playing, Graham has managed to get a really clean a warm sound from his recorded drums.
As I mentioned in a previous entry, I’ve been planning on using the GMS in an ensemble setting. I finally had the chance to do this as a duet with Graham O’Brien on drums. Things went fairly well, although I managed to discover another bug my application handling the external sync. Rather than trying to fix it during the session, I just used an old version and tiptoed around the difficulties by not using an external controller as I had wanted to. Nevertheless we were able to produce some nice studies for our first attempt. Here’s an excerpt from our third jam of the evening.
After a few performances live looping with Ableton and the GMS, I have found it cumbersome and frustrating to have to repeatedly swap between the two applications. To solve this, I have added he ability to control the GMS with an external MIDI device. I achieved this by creating an XML document with the parameters included as tags with a CC attribute to designate what control change value to use for each setting here’s a few lines out of the XML document.
As you can see I’m using knobs to adjust some settings and buttons to adjust others. It’s really fun to turn a knob on my Korg MS2000 and see the sliders in my software start to move in response. Program change for presets and note on for transposition will work from any old controller, but the rest of the parameters need to be mapped to knobs, sliders or buttons. In total I have around thirty-six specific parameters that are now adjustable with a controller.
The sound of the water going over this section of the Coon Rapids dam across the Mississippi river about fifteen miles North of Minneapolis, was deafening. Virtually all other sound within the environment was drowned (no pun intended) out by the fierce white water noise. I made a recording that is about a minute and a half long. Here’s about thirty seconds of it, but my questions is what would one use this sort of sound for, other than water over a dam sound effects? 
After checking out a few bands during the 
As I mentioned in a previous entry, I’ve been planning on using the