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.
Today I decided to record my electric drill. It was on a list of “things i need to record”. Power tools make some great sounds with all sorts of textures and frequencies. I captured the sound of the drill in stereo at a variety of speeds. I also got the sound of switching the drill from forward to reverse. Afterward I chopped it up into a percussive loop and ran it through beat repeat to get a nice mechanical loop going.
Beat repeat has pitch decay setting that incrementally lowers the pitch of repeated slices, which you can hear in the piece. I also maximized the chance settings to increase the likelihood of repeats happening and the variation setting to vary the length of the slices used in the repetition.
Last Friday I posted sounds created by rowers on the Mississippi river. Sadly, weak batteries prevented me from capturing much more, but I gave them a rest and had another go a bit later in the evening. This time my aim was to record the sound of the fire crackling. I wasn’t bothered about the general ambiance of the site, or the noise my mates were making as I made the recording.
What you hear is the fire crackling, a plane flying overhead, someone breaking sticks for the fire, someone crushing a can (we only bring cans and pack them all out when we leave, often including other cans that were there before we arrived), and a couple of my friends chatting about meteorites before the batteries gave out again. Before we left we made sure that the fire was completely out and no stray cans were left behind.
I created this piece today by starting with a few percussive micro samples from a recent field recording and using them as percussion. After programming a simple pattern I ran it through Pluggo’s Harmonic Filter and resampled the results to get two musical loops; one with a low frequency hit that forms the bass in the piece and another with a simple descending melody.
I put a triplet ping-pong delay on one send and an enormous reverb on another then made a quick 1:40 minute mix to hear how it all sounded together. I haven’t explained all the details by any means, so if you have any questions about what you’re hearing post a comment and I’ll give you more information.
One of the things I like to do with a few friends is ride bikes to a spot along the Mississippi river, light a fire, and have a few beers. It’s the best happy hour in town. At this particular spot it is not uncommon to catch the University of Minnesota row team practicing. Anticipating this possibility I decided to put a field recorder and microphone in my bag.
Unfortunately I did not have the foresight to bring extra batteries so all I was able to capture was this short section of a four man team going by followed by their coach in a motor boat with a megaphone. At this time of the evening the river is like glass, so shortly afterward you can hear their wake splashing on the beach.
Forgetting the batteries was not the only mistake I made. I also set the levels too low and although I was using a wind screen the recording was dominated by a low frequency wind rumble that would not have been there had I enabled the bass roll-off on the mic. I did my best to fix it by boosting the levels and running it through a high pass filter.
Old monophonic synthesizers have had all sorts of ways to sequence notes; from fairly complex programmable sequencers to simple arpeggiation. Arpeggiators are nice because they sequence the notes that are played on the keyboard in realtime, allowing the performer to improvise while taking advantage of the capabilities of the machine at the same time. Based on the speed of the LFO, the arpeggiator on the Sequential Circuits Pro-One will sequence all the notes in a chord in either ascending order, descending order, or both. Other synths offer a feature to play the notes in a random sequence. In this example the notes are played in ascending order. I cranked up the LFO and added some delay so that the notes blend into each other so you can hear the harmony in the sequence. With this technique you can sort of simulate polyphony on a mono-synth.
Today I decided to record my electric drill. It was on a list of “things i need to record”. Power tools make some great sounds with all sorts of textures and frequencies. I captured the sound of the drill in stereo at a variety of speeds. I also got the sound of switching the drill from forward to reverse. Afterward I chopped it up into a percussive loop and ran it through beat repeat to get a nice mechanical loop going. 
Last Friday I posted sounds created by rowers on the Mississippi river. Sadly, weak batteries prevented me from capturing much more, but I gave them a rest and had another go a bit later in the evening. This time my aim was to record the sound of the fire crackling. I wasn’t bothered about the general ambiance of the site, or the noise my mates were making as I made the recording. 
I created this piece today by starting with a few percussive micro samples from a recent field recording and using them as percussion. After programming a simple pattern I ran it through Pluggo’s Harmonic Filter and resampled the results to get two musical loops; one with a low frequency hit that forms the bass in the piece and another with a simple descending melody. 
One of the things I like to do with a few friends is ride bikes to a spot along the Mississippi river, light a fire, and have a few beers. It’s the best happy hour in town. At this particular spot it is not uncommon to catch the University of Minnesota row team practicing. Anticipating this possibility I decided to put a field recorder and microphone in my bag. 
Old monophonic synthesizers have had all sorts of ways to sequence notes; from fairly complex programmable sequencers to simple arpeggiation. Arpeggiators are nice because they sequence the notes that are played on the keyboard in realtime, allowing the performer to improvise while taking advantage of the capabilities of the machine at the same time. Based on the speed of the LFO, the arpeggiator on the Sequential Circuits Pro-One will sequence all the notes in a chord in either ascending order, descending order, or both. Other synths offer a feature to play the notes in a random sequence. In this example the notes are played in ascending order. I cranked up the LFO and added some delay so that the notes blend into each other so you can hear the harmony in the sequence. With this technique you can sort of simulate polyphony on a mono-synth.