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.

Video Game Music Remixes: Tetris

Posted on December 2, 2008 by John CS Keston

As I have mentioned in previous entries I give an assignment in my audio production class on importing MIDI files and producing music using Propellerheads Reason. The goal of the assignment is to learn about MIDI as an interface, protocol, and file format, and to learn some of the basics of Reason.

Usually I demonstrate how to do this with a MIDI file from Classical Archives, but I also use popular music examples from mididb.com, and I always get an enthusiastic response when using a MIDI file from a video game. A great site for video game MIDI files is vgmusic.com.

Consequently, many of the projects turned in are remixes of video game music. This quarter I have a student who is planning on submitting his work to Overclocked Remix, a site dedicated entirely to remixes of video game music. Another talented student named Ben Siegel produced this excellent version of the theme from Tetris that starts out with piano and then builds into a disco classic.

Tetris Remix by Ben Siegel

Nine Forms of Transportation in One Day

Posted on December 1, 2008 by John CS Keston

My first method of transportation was cycling to a meeting at my work in downtown Minneapolis. After cycling home and packing for my trip I walked to the bus stop, caught a bus to the light rail and took that to the Hubert H. Humphrey airport. I walked, took an elevator and an escalator to get to the terminal. After meeting my wife, we took at plane to Seattle and used the moving walkway to get to the bag claim area where her parents picked us up and drove us to their home in Gig Harbor, Washington. So the complete list is cycling, walking, bus, rail, elevator, escalator, plane, moving walkway, and automobile.

Here’s a compilation of excerpts from six of the methods of transportation that I managed to get the recorder out in time to capture. The sequence is bus, rail, walking, elevator, airplane (take off and landing), and automobile. I hastily transitioned them all together with cross fades in Audacity on my mother-in-law’s PC because I foolishly decided to leave my laptop at home. Thanks, Julie!

Six Forms of Transportation

Flash Player Version 10.0.12.36 Audio Playback Bug

Posted on December 1, 2008 by John CS Keston

Windows users who have upgraded their Adobe Flash players to version 10.0.12.36 will hear warping and distortion in most of the audio examples on ACB. The problem is a documented bug in the Flash player that only manifests while playing audio that is rendered at either 22kHz or 48kHz. Since most of my mixes are at 48kHz before I convert them to mp3s this problem will effect a lot of ACB readers. Hopefully Adobe will have a fix out soon, but until then please click on the title of the audio rather than the player button to listen if you are experiencing playback issues. If you have an older version of the player, or use a Mac you will not be effected by this bug. Update: apparently Mac users with the new version of the plugin have the problem as well. The problem is described here with an AS2 workaround. I’m still looking at solutions, in the meantime, other than clicking on the title versus the play button, the only other solution is to downgrade your Flash player.

http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FP-862

Hamamatsu No. G210

Posted on November 30, 2008 by John CS Keston

Here’s a rough mix of a track that I’m working on for an upcoming album of material that I’ve been producing since August, 2008. I have committed to a release date of March 24, 2009 on Unearthed Music and I’m probably a bit more than half finished. Hopefully I’m on schedule. This piece was based on a simple loop of acoustic guitar that I played on an old Kawai with a missing string and a broken tuning peg. In fact I only used the low E and the A string on the instrument. The synth bass, pads, and melody are all made up of captured MIDI clips played on a keyboard controller and directed to VSTs of one kind or another. It’s close to being final, but still a bit of a rough mix, so comments are welcome.

Hamamatsu No. G210

Octave Pedal Rhodes

Posted on November 29, 2008 by John CS Keston

A variation of this clip is probably going to end up in a new track that Nils Westdal and I are working on. After a recent session Nils left his Boss OC-1 pedal in the studio for me to mess around with. The first thing I did was plug the Rhodes into it. The cool thing about the OC-1 is that if you play intervals into it it gets confused and randomly switches between notes. The results are unpredictable, but it’s also possible to get consistently unpredictable results. I know it sounds like an oxymoron, but duplicating certain intervals at specific dynamics allows you to mold the output into something usable. This is what I was going for in this example. I edited the recording to a suitable length, added some delay, and then automated a filter to manipulate the texture.