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.
I finally made a dock connector for my third generation iPod that I’ve been making experimental recordings on with Linux and an AT822 stereo mic. Prior to making the dock connector I was only able to make mono recordings via the headphone jack. Since the dock connector only accepts a line level signal, I am pre-amping the AT822 with my ailing Sony PCM-M1 DAT recorder (it eats tapes, so it’s a useful retirement).
With this setup I am able to use the otherwise useless DAT recorder by connecting the stereo mic to the mic input, putting the device in record mode, adjusting the levels, and then taking the line out to the dock connector on the iPod as shown in the photograph. The recordings are relatively clean except for a tiny bit of high frequency interference that I haven’t tracked down yet.
The only other problem is that recording in stereo seems to tax the resources of the iPod. When I try to record at a sampling rate higher than 44.1kHz the audio is likely to suffer from a bizarre digital jitter effect. Here’s an example of a piano recording at 88kHz that I played and edited together to illustrate the jitter problem. I wouldn’t use this rate for anything I want to record well, but I kind of like the stuttering sound it creates as the iPod fails to process the audio quickly enough to store it accurately.
I top and tailed this clip of ambiance from a popular lunch spot in downtown Minneapolis, applying quick fades in the beginning and end of the twenty four second example. I also applied normalization to boost the levels.
One of the employees prompts a customer into ordering his peperoni sandwich. After that I examine a bag of chips and my friend Derrin advises me that “there’s four chips in that bag”.
A couple of weeks ago, while working in the studio with Nils Westdal, we decided to experiment with an old amplifier that has a built in spring reverb. We plugged the direct out into a firewire interface and hit the record button in the software. Nothing was plugged into the amp, but by turning up the reverb knob all the way and the volume most of the way up, the spring reverb became very sensitive to vibrations. All that was left to do was to bang the amp around a bit while capturing the output.
Last Friday, November 7th, to mark my one hundredth sound posted in the One Sound Every Day category, I sequenced forty two equally sized micro samples extracted from sounds I had posted here on AudioCookbook.org. Due to a trip scheduled out of the country, I ran out of time and did not compile all of the available ninety nine sounds into the piece. As promised in the original post, I have now managed to complete the chronologically sequenced compilation of micro samples into eight seconds of chaotic noise. I extended the one hundredth sample of Caribbean surf as an ending to the staccato sequence.
Slashdot.org has an article about a site that is hosting the sounds of thirty five different hard drives failing. Although the recording quality is generally poor there are some really interesting sounds including a Maxtor drive with a stuck spindle producing a “futuristic cell phone melody”. You can read the article and checkout the sounds here, although it might be a bit busy due to the site being slashdotted.
Also, click the image to see a video of a remix of Nude by Radiohead made entirely out of sounds captured from old computer peripherals including a dot matrix printer, scanner, cassette drive, hard drives, and so on. The remix and video was created by Glasgow based artist James Houston.
I finally made a dock connector for my third generation iPod that I’ve been making experimental recordings on with Linux and an AT822 stereo mic. Prior to making the dock connector I was only able to make mono recordings via the headphone jack. Since the dock connector only accepts a line level signal, I am pre-amping the AT822 with my ailing Sony PCM-M1 DAT recorder (it eats tapes, so it’s a useful retirement). 
I top and tailed this clip of ambiance from a popular lunch spot in downtown Minneapolis, applying quick fades in the beginning and end of the twenty four second example. I also applied normalization to boost the levels. 
A couple of weeks ago, while working in the studio with Nils Westdal, we decided to experiment with an old amplifier that has a built in spring reverb. We plugged the direct out into a firewire interface and hit the record button in the software. Nothing was plugged into the amp, but by turning up the reverb knob all the way and the volume most of the way up, the spring reverb became very sensitive to vibrations. All that was left to do was to bang the amp around a bit while capturing the output. 
Last Friday, November 7th, to mark my one hundredth sound posted in the 