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.
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.
This electrical crackling sound was made with the GMS while the tempo was set quite high and the note duration probability distributions were set to favor two adjacent values. The speed that the notes were played made the frequency of playing the notes more audible than the pitch of the individual sounds themselves. The randomized durations at that speed created a sputtering quality that, to my ear, sounds very similar to high voltage electrical sparks. Interestingly it turns out that the GMS might be useful for sound design as well as a composition and performance tool.
To create this silliness I set the GMS to play the drums on the built in Java Sound Synthesizer. I adjusted the tempo and duration probabilities to something ridiculous then captured the output on my PCM-D50. Since this experiment I have made a few more that are even more high speed and scattered. Perhaps I’ll post more examples of this nature. I have rare instances of longer durations inabled in the probability distribution, so as you’re listening, every so often you may think that it’s over (finally!) when suddenly it starts up again with obnoxiousness.
Here’s another segment of some experimenting I did with Grant Muller’s GOL Sequencer Bank. One suggestion I would make if you are planning on have a look at his application is to try using some example patterns from John Conway’s original work. Also, when you come across new forms that survive well, document them so that you can recreate them for future sequences.
This electrical crackling sound was made with the 
To create this silliness I set the