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 created this bouncy reverberated sound with an FM synthesis virtual instrument called X.FM which is one of the example “patches” within the famous Cycling ’74 produced integrated development environment Max 5. The X.FM patch is a complete fully featured virtual instrument and can be played with a MIDI controller or by tapping a keyboard “object” with the mouse. The instrument is capable of a broad variety of sounds which can easily be illustrated by randomizing the parameters and then listening to the results.
This atmospheric effect is a continuation of the experiment from yesterday involving the Flying Waves VST. This time I loaded up a sample of air bubbles being blown into a glass of water. The original sound can be heard here. I also ran the output through an analog modeling delay and then recorded the results as I manipulated the pitch and volume. The result is a wet, atmospheric, psychedelic texture of ambiance. The next step I might would be to sweep the panning or apply some processing to spread the stereo spectrum since the output at this stage is still in mono.
To generate this pattern I loaded a basic TR-808 kick drum sample into one of the most simple Pluggo VSTs called Flying Waves. The controls in Flying Waves are a set of movable cross hairs on a grid, volume and an external sample button. Moving the cross hairs up and down increases and lowers the pitch of the sample while left and right lowers and increases the volume respectively. With a sine wave you can get Theremin like sounds.
After loading in the 808 kick I resampled myself adjusting the cross hairs for a few minutes until I had some interesting patterns to work with. After that I cut and pasted a bar that was a good representation of what I was going for, then I looped it four times and rendered the results.
There are so many ways to use processing to make scary sounds that it’s almost too easy. The classic reverse reverb in the original Poltergeist comes to mind. This example is a recording of a conversation with a colleague during a lunch break at a busy sandwich joint. It’s been reversed, pitched down significantly, run through a low pass filter, slowly phased, filter delayed and run through a long reverb. All this processing has diffused the voices into a hellish ambient drone.
The weather was unseasonably warm in Minneapolis today. As I write this it is nineteen degrees centigrade (sixty six degrees fahrenheit) at 7:11pm on a usual chilly late October evening. Days like this require mates on bikes to meet outdoors to drink beer at undisclosed locations near bodies of water. On my way to such a location I was held up by a train and decided to record it.
By the time I had my gear out of the bag the train had passed, but the warning bells were still ringing so I walked up to them while recording. I’m fairly sure that these bells are not mechanical, or even analog, but here they are nonetheless with all the ambiance included.
I created this bouncy reverberated sound with an FM synthesis virtual instrument called X.FM which is one of the example “patches” within the famous Cycling ’74 produced integrated development environment Max 5. The X.FM patch is a complete fully featured virtual instrument and can be played with a MIDI controller or by tapping a keyboard “object” with the mouse. The instrument is capable of a broad variety of sounds which can easily be illustrated by randomizing the parameters and then listening to the results. 
This atmospheric effect is a continuation of the experiment from yesterday involving the Flying Waves VST. This time I loaded up a sample of air 
To generate this pattern I loaded a basic 
There are so many ways to use processing to make scary sounds that it’s almost too easy. The classic reverse reverb in the original Poltergeist comes to mind. This example is a recording of a conversation with a colleague during a lunch break at a busy sandwich joint. It’s been reversed, pitched down significantly, run through a low pass filter, slowly phased, filter delayed and run through a long reverb. All this processing has diffused the voices into a hellish ambient drone. 
The weather was unseasonably warm in Minneapolis today. As I write this it is nineteen degrees centigrade (sixty six degrees fahrenheit) at 7:11pm on a usual chilly late October evening. Days like this require mates on bikes to meet outdoors to drink beer at undisclosed locations near bodies of water. On my way to such a location I was held up by a train and decided to record it.