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.
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!
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.
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.
ACB reader, Matt, suggested I try the time correction technique in the last post in a different order. Previously I had dropped the pitch two octaves and then brought it back up two with the time correction enabled. This time I did the opposite, starting by increasing the pitch then lowering it to its original position. It definitely has a different sound. I think it’s much closer to the original than the previous example, but still an interesting way to manipulate the clip.
Today during my audio production class I was demonstrating to my students how time correction impacts digital audio when pitch shifting more than a few semitones. To illustrate this I pitched down a chunk of music an octave with the time correction on in Pro Tools. The degradation was clear, but it occurred to me that it would be even more obvious if I shifted it back up to the original pitch with time correction enabled again.
This created an interesting way to effectively down-sample the audio. Intrigued, I applied the same technique over several times to hear what would happen on multiple passes. This is something I’m likely to explore more, but I tried it again on the snippet of music from Unprocessed Rhodes Pedal Noise going down two octaves and back up again. It sounds like the audio has been boiled in a pot of bathroom chemicals. Delicious!
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!
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. 
Today during my audio production class I was demonstrating to my students how time correction impacts digital audio when pitch shifting more than a few semitones. To illustrate this I pitched down a chunk of music an octave with the time correction on in Pro Tools. The degradation was clear, but it occurred to me that it would be even more obvious if I shifted it back up to the original pitch with time correction enabled again.