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.
On December 1, 2008 I posted an article about a playback bug in Adobe Flash Player version 10.0.12.36. At that time I was encoding a majority of my audio clips at 48kHz and 24bit, then compressing the MP3 versions to 192kbps. This caused the audio to playback in the Flash player poorly with considerable amounts of warping and distortion. Since then I have been down-sampling my clips to 44.1kHz and 16bit before creating the MP3 to avoid the issue. Although the fix came out early in February, I think I will continue doing this for the time being, until most readers have had time to upgrade their Flash plugins. If you ever look at archived or random entries, I’d suggested upgrading so you don’t experience the playback problems.
Here is another recently produced example of processing sound with Photoshop via Photosounder. In this instance I applied the Halftone Pattern filter under the Distort sub menu.
With this particular effect I find the sound of the noise in between the phrases of dialogue more interesting than the dialogue itself. It has an odd digital scrambling sort of quality that I can imagine using in a audio project for one reason or another.
Early last week a student showed me Thru-You.com, a collection of YouTube video mashups by Israeli, neo-funk artist Kutiman. I was thoroughly impressed with his work, but soon afterward the site went down due to bandwidth limits. Since then it’s been up and down several times. Hopefully they’ll have their bandwidth problems sorted out soon, so If you can’t view these videos straight away, bookmark the site and check back because they’re worth the wait. Update: The videos have been moved to YouTube, so there should be no more bandwidth issues.
Signs of Spring are making themselves heard in Minneapolis. For example, I recorded the sound of snow quickly melting into a storm drain near the Mississippi river in Minneapolis last night. The temperature was approaching fifty degrees Fahrenheit (ten Centigrade) creating a steady stream of water pouring into a grate adjacent to a cobble stone street. The sound was loud enough to capture my attention as I cycled past it, and nearly drowned (no pun intended) out the ambient noise of traffic and a nearby power plant.
The Sound Garden project by Norbert Herber was recently installed at the 2009 Spark Festival of Electronic Music and Arts. By good fortune I was in the right place at the right time and had the opportunity to discuss the work with the artist at the event.
The installation includes multiple channels of speakers and a variety of sensors where the installation is installed. It is also linked to a web application where sound files are “planted” and “pruned” by site visitors. Visitors to the physical location for the installation influence the audio processing by interacting with various sensors in the space.
A more thorough explanation of Norbert’s piece is available on his site. Norbert gave me permission to capture a segment from the audio stream for the purpose of this article. Before doing so I planted one of my own files from Audio Cookbook to influence the output.
On December 1, 2008 I posted an article about a playback bug in Adobe Flash Player version 10.0.12.36. At that time I was encoding a majority of my audio clips at 48kHz and 24bit, then compressing the MP3 versions to 192kbps. This caused the audio to playback in the Flash player poorly with considerable amounts of warping and distortion. Since then I have been down-sampling my clips to 44.1kHz and 16bit before creating the MP3 to avoid the issue. Although the fix came out early in February, I think I will continue doing this for the time being, until most readers have had time to upgrade their Flash plugins. If you ever look at archived or random entries, I’d suggested upgrading so you don’t experience the playback problems.
Here is another recently produced example of processing sound with 
Signs of Spring are making themselves heard in Minneapolis. For example, I recorded the sound of snow quickly melting into a storm drain near the Mississippi river in Minneapolis last night. The temperature was approaching fifty degrees Fahrenheit (ten Centigrade) creating a steady stream of water pouring into a grate adjacent to a cobble stone street. The sound was loud enough to capture my attention as I cycled past it, and nearly drowned (no pun intended) out the ambient noise of traffic and a nearby power plant. 