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.

Leafcutter John Remix Competition

ACB contributor, recording artist, educator, one-man-software-house, installation artist, and luthier, Leafcutter John is having a remix competition. Click the image for more details on how to enter the competition. I’d love to be involved, but am too busy with my GMS and other projects at the moment. Hopefully some ACB readers will take this on so I can live vicariously through them. There’s lots of really good remixes already, so get cracking!

Freesound.org Loop

One thing I often do when illustrating to my students the breadth of sounds available on Freesound.org is to start looping multiple sounds simultaneously to instantly create a new sound piece. I never really bother capturing these, but recently I routed the output to Pro Tools as the loops were going in Freesound and got this result. The sounds used can be found here.

Lovely Loop

Mystery Sound Number One

Something that I have wanted to do for a while, is post a sound without giving away any clues as to what the sound actually is so that readers can guess or perhaps even debate about it until I come along and reveal the truth. So, here it is. I’m not saying what if any processing was applied, where or when, or how or why it was recorded. If you think you know what this sound is, please respond in a comment with your guess. The winner will receive the all expense paid recognition of being the first reader to figure it out. And, no, it’s not a cow giving birth, and neither is the photo any sort of clue. However, I imagine that this one will not be difficult to solve. Have fun!

Mystery Sound

Earlier Freesound.org Loop

Here’s an earlier example of a loop from Freesound.org that I produced for my class in the same fashion as the example that I described in Freesound.org Loop. I’d love to hear other examples of these, so if you have them, please post them in a comment.

Earlier Freesound Loop

Tenor Saxophone by Dougal Caston

My brother Anthony Caston is visiting from the UK with his wife Sheena, daughter Lucy and son Dougal. At just sixteen years old, Dougal is an accomplished jazz saxophonist who has already had the opportunity to perform and audition with several well know jazz musicians.

He hopes to attend the London Royal Academy of Music or Trinity College of Music in about eighteen months. Dougal sat in with my group Keston and Westdal at the Kitty Cat Klub in Minneapolis last Wednesday, and last Saturday we spent nearly seven hours jamming in my studio. Here’s a short phrase of his playing that I recorded with my AKG c4000b.

Shown at right is my nephew Dougal giving my nephew Tony an early saxophone lesson in my dining room in Minneapolis.

Dougal on Tenor Sax