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.

Track Built Around My Favorite GMS Melody

Posted on May 13, 2009 by John CS Keston

inverted_top I was going to hold off on posting this piece until I had had a chance to produce it a little bit more. I did cheat and added a four-on-the-floor kick drum pattern to drive it along, but otherwise every loop was generated with “light controllers” using the GMS.

For this piece I used spinning tops with flashing colored LEDs inside. You may recognize the melody from My Favorite GMS Generated Melody So Far.

GMS Practice Piece Number 4

My Favorite GMS Generated Melody So Far

Posted on May 12, 2009 by John CS Keston

I’ve been spending most of my limited spare time practicing with the GMS in preparation for tomorrow nights performance in Minneapolis. While practicing tonight I produced this melody. I was controlling the sequencer with a blinking led, spinning top and randomly looped this sequence of notes.

I’ve since built a track around it with more loops from the GMS, but it sounds good on its own. The nice thing about this technique is that everything I capture is MIDI, so if I get a good melody, but don’t like the sound, it’s easy to change the timbre, tempo, transposition, etc. In other words, beyond being a performance tool, I can use it effectively for composition and idea gathering.

My Favorite GMS Generated Melody So Far

GMS Practice Track Number 3

Posted on May 11, 2009 by John CS Keston

top_lights I’ve almost finished with my initial round of tweaking and bug fixing on the GMS, so I’ve finally been able to put a bit more time into actually using the software for its intended purpose. My most recent work with it involves a companion document in Ableton Live that loads a number of virtual instruments into about nine separate MIDI tracks. Ableton provides the external sync via the Apple IAC (Inter-Application Communication) drivers. In turn, the GMS sends MIDI note on and off data to the instruments in Ableton. Using this method I can live loop on various tracks and build a multi-timbral composition in real-time. Here’s an example for a recent practice session.