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.

Obliterating Audio with Photoshop

Posted on January 27, 2009 by John CS Keston

So far my examples of Processing Sound Using Photoshop have been recognizable in comparison to the original versions. In my initial experiments my intent was to apply subtle changes as a reference. However, it’s interesting to hear what happens without restraint. Here I applied the Wave filter, which in many respects is analogous to sound. For example, you can assign a sine, square, or triangle wave to process the image. This filter changes the sound so dramatically that you might very well get similar results from altogether different sound sources. Imagine an ensemble of people wobbling sheets of flexible material in sync with each other.

Wave Electric Piano Pattern

Gaussian Blur

Posted on January 26, 2009 by John CS Keston

Gaussian blur was the first Photoshop filter I tried applying to sound. I was not sure what to expect. I imagined the signal might be distorted or over-driven in some way. A Gaussian blur is created by applying a Gaussian function, which is also used in statistics for normal distribution. Instead of hearing distortion, the audio, to my ears, actually sounds blurred. The effect is like a chorus, but the envelope is less clear. The attack of each note seems slower or spread out while the frequency is blended or even slightly warbled. All in all a pleasantly surprising experiment.

Gaussian Blurred Electric Piano Pattern

Liquefied

Posted on January 25, 2009 by John CS Keston

Once again, here’s the same electric piano from Processing Sound Using Photoshop. This time is has been liquefied by the Photoshop filter of the same name. Liquefy is nice because is relies on the human element of dragging through the image to warp it in the direction the mouse pointer is moved. I purposefully did not liquefy short sections of the waveform so I could compare the original signal and the manipulated one.

Liquified Electric Piano Pattern

Spherized

Posted on January 24, 2009 by John CS Keston

The Spherize filter in Photoshop is designed to force an image to bubble outward as if wrapping it around a sphere. Can you imagine what it would sound like to warp audio in the same fashion? I imagined that that the frequency would warp downward as the waveform was stretched and then back up to the original pitch on the opposite side.

Well, that’s almost exactly what happened, although I didn’t expect it to sound as deep and eerie as it does. For this entry I have shortened the image horizontally to emphasize what the filter actually did. I also lightened the image to make it more visible. It looks a bit like a zeppelin whereas the original image of the sound was flat. Please enjoy the Spherized version of the loop from the last entry.

Spherize Electric Piano Pattern

Processing Sound Using Photoshop

Posted on January 23, 2009 by John CS Keston

Sound designers, musicians, producers and engineers are all familiar with manipulating sound through the use of audio processing. Most examples of processing, like filters, reverbs, and delays produce a relatively predictable result. I’m interested in processing that has an unpredictable result. For example, the octave pedal that purrs like a robotic kitten when you feed it harmonic input, that I wrote about in Octave Pedal Rhodes. I have a similar interest in producing sound directly from visual media with tools like Michel Rouzic’s Photosounder, which I used for Conversion of Graffiti into Sound.

One of the first things I tried to do with Photosounder was to capture the image it creates from imported audio in order to use an image editing application as an audio processor. This didn’t work very well because much of the resolution was lost with the screen grab. Since then, Michel has added a feature to export full resolution spectral images of sound. This makes the concept of using a Photoshop filter as an audio processor possible.

To test this concept I created a simple pattern with an electric piano patch and opened it in Photosounder. Without changing any settings I immediately saved the sound as a bitmap image. Next I opened the image in Photoshop and started experimenting with filters. Once I had some filtered images I loaded them back into Photosounder to see how they sounded. Gaussian blur and Liquefy created some unique effects, but my favorite of the bunch was Glowing Edges. This filter seems to transform the electric piano into a haunting choral passage.