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.
You’ve probably heard enough about my Casiotone 403 by now, but I’m not finished with it yet. What’s my fixation with this outdated, inflexible, cheese filled, imitation wood grain dinosaur? I don’t quite know myself. I can tell you that it’s not the kitsch factor. I actually like the way this relic sounds. So much so that I bothered to open it up to repair a sticky key. What I found inside were well organized electronics in a wooden and metal chassis that opened up like a clam and invited me in. So here’s another example of of sound from the Casiotone. I added a bass line with the Maxi-Korg and delay on the comping. Two great tastes that go great together.
As well as classic drum patterns the Casiotone 403 has some nice vintage analog keyboard tones. Short of circuit bending, there’s not really any way to manipulate those tones other than vibrato and sustain under the effects section. These are simple on or off settings, so there’s no depth, speed, or decay adjustments. You get what you’re given, but that’s what you’d expect from an instrument of this sort, and part of its charm.
I actually have used this keyboard for a couple of performances. Once at the May day festival in Minneapolis I played it with a group of kale wearing performers. During the parade we were joined by Wavy Gravy, so we gave him a mic and accompanied him for thirty minutes or so. There’s a lot more to this story that I won’t go into here, but in any case my favorite line that he used was, “Don’t eat the brown kale”. Afterward I had him sign my brown, wood grain Casiotone 403.
I’ve been sampling my Casiotone 403 recently. I have recorded and sampled this instrument in the past, but this time I wanted to gather some of the beats at a slow tempo so that I could play them at many different tempos without hearing artifacts created when time expanding or compressing. This is a loop of the familiar Samba setting. I recorded it at 85 bpm, then cranked the tempo up to 195 bpm and looped it four times before rendering this example.
If you turn it up loud enough you’ll hear an unfortunate buzz. I attempted to get rid of the buzz using a noise gate, but I couldn’t get it to sound the way I wanted it to. I also thought about (and will probably do this eventually) sampling each sound at a very slow tempo and creating an instrument out of the individual samples. But for now I was interested in maintaining the charm of the original programs.
Here’s a short little bass line I recorded while reacquainting myself with my Maxi-Korg yesterday. I love the gritty sound of this instrument, one of the most well known of the duophonic synthesizers. Sometimes I find myself reaching for the non-existent pitch or modulation wheels, but the limitations of these vintage devices are part of their charm and might encourage the musician to come up with new ways to play (or rediscover old ways).
Another thing that I love about vintage gear is the lack of presets. When I come up with a sound I like I simply say to myself, “you’re never going to get exactly that sound ever again”. You can always jot down the settings, but I never do. This way you’re forced to learn how to control the device and approximate the sounds that you have created in the past if necessary.
There are quite a few applications available that produce audio from imagery. Whether it’s photography, or computer generated graphics the results can be fascinating. For further exploration an article that describes eight programs that convert imagery to sound called Say it With Pictures is available on emusician.com. An additional application that I’ve been looking at recently called Photosounder has the unique capability of allowing you to manipulate sound in its image state. This creates a whole host of effects from time stretching to flipping the sound upside down creating a bizarre, inverse, reflection of the original sound. For this example I used Photosounder to process the sound from More Memory Man Madness. A few of the adjustments I made were the rotation of the image, the gamma property, and pixels per second.
You’ve probably heard enough about my Casiotone 403 by now, but I’m not finished with it yet. What’s my fixation with this outdated, inflexible, cheese filled, imitation wood grain dinosaur? I don’t quite know myself. I can tell you that it’s not the kitsch factor. I actually like the way this relic sounds. So much so that I bothered to open it up to repair a sticky key. What I found inside were well organized electronics in a wooden and metal chassis that opened up like a clam and invited me in. So here’s another example of of sound from the Casiotone. I added a bass line with the Maxi-Korg and delay on the comping. Two great tastes that go great together. 
As well as classic drum patterns the Casiotone 403 has some nice vintage analog keyboard tones. Short of circuit bending, there’s not really any way to manipulate those tones other than vibrato and sustain under the effects section. These are simple on or off settings, so there’s no depth, speed, or decay adjustments. You get what you’re given, but that’s what you’d expect from an instrument of this sort, and part of its charm. 
I’ve been sampling my Casiotone 403 recently. I have recorded and sampled this instrument in the past, but this time I wanted to gather some of the beats at a slow tempo so that I could play them at many different tempos without hearing artifacts created when time expanding or compressing. This is a loop of the familiar Samba setting. I recorded it at 85 bpm, then cranked the tempo up to 195 bpm and looped it four times before rendering this example. 
Here’s a short little bass line I recorded while reacquainting myself with my Maxi-Korg yesterday. I love the gritty sound of this instrument, one of the most well known of the duophonic synthesizers. Sometimes I find myself reaching for the non-existent pitch or modulation wheels, but the limitations of these vintage devices are part of their charm and might encourage the musician to come up with new ways to play (or rediscover old ways). 
There are quite a few applications available that produce audio from imagery. Whether it’s photography, or computer generated graphics the results can be fascinating. For further exploration an article that describes eight programs that convert imagery to sound called