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.
To celebrate the University of Minnesota Northrop Auditorium’s 80th anniversary season a concert was performed on Friday by three-hundred students from the School of Music’s Symphony Orchestra and Combined Choirs. The piece was Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, Op. 125 “Choral.” The event was sold out and by the time I got tickets all the good seats were taken, so my recording suffered significantly. I was located near the front, but as far as possible to stage left. This left me in front of the ancient speaker system used to amplify the concert. There was also loud ventilation and the crowd ambiance seemed to collect in my corner of the space. Never-the-less the concert was thoroughly enjoyable, but it’s unlikely that I’ll do much listening to my ragged bootleg version. Here’s the orchestra tuning their instruments.
This eight minute segment of audio generated by the GMS is from the first eight minutes of our most recent MAW (minneapolisartonwheels.org) outing.
This was my first chance to take advantage of the presets feature, but the performance led me to expand the octave setting to include adjustments for the top and bottom octaves. During this performance the octave setting was limited to only allowing the top octave to be lowered. This made it so that instruments with a limited range, like drums, are difficult to play since much of the screen might be inactive.
The latest feature I have added to the GMS is a way to store ten presets. Each preset holds thirty-four distinct settings including all twelve note probability values, all seven duration probability values, note probabilities on/off, duration probabilities on/off, sustain on/off, free time mode vs bpm, dotted notes on/off, video mirroring on/off, tempo in BPM, note durations, transposition, scale, MIDI out channel, dotted note probabilities, note randomness, and octave range minimum and maximum. The presets can be changed by clicking a radio button, or pressing control plus the preset number. This feature makes it possible to instantly and dramatically change the behavior of the GMS. I also added a primitive save and load feature to mantain the content of the presets. Here’s a segment from a test recording.
Minneapolis based sound designer and Nobot band member Kyle Vande Slunt recently alerted me to an excellent animated short titled Subprime – “watch the american housing market spiral out of control”. The animation was produced by Beeple, otherwise known as graphic designer, short film and music video producer Mike Winkelmann.
The music was produced by Nobot and the sound design by Kyle Vande Slunt. Kyle is a talented musician and sound designer working actively in the industry. You can view his demo reel and hear examples of his work at standingwavesound.com. He has also offered to contribute to ACB, so keep a lookout for an article or two from him soon.
As I spend virtually every spare moment working on the GMS I’m looking forward to slowing down the development of this sequencer so I can start using it effectively, but for now I’m happy to create the odd glitch or space pad here and there. Here’s a glitchy segment of sound created by classic, channel ten drums at high speed.
To celebrate the University of Minnesota Northrop Auditorium’s 80th anniversary season a concert was performed on Friday by three-hundred students from the School of Music’s Symphony Orchestra and Combined Choirs. The piece was Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, Op. 125 “Choral.” The event was sold out and by the time I got tickets all the good seats were taken, so my recording suffered significantly. I was located near the front, but as far as possible to stage left. This left me in front of the ancient speaker system used to amplify the concert. There was also loud ventilation and the crowd ambiance seemed to collect in my corner of the space. Never-the-less the concert was thoroughly enjoyable, but it’s unlikely that I’ll do much listening to my ragged bootleg version. Here’s the orchestra tuning their instruments.
This eight minute segment of audio generated by the 
The latest feature I have added to the