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.
To create this sound I took the bubbles sound from yesterday and programmed it into a simple sampling VST. I built a pattern of chords in a MIDI clip that covered a wide range of frequencies for the sample simultaneously. This created a sort of spectrum of pitches. The next step was to spread that spectrum of pitches by resampling the output in a processor called Fragulator that effectively chops up the sample into fragments that can then be automatically looped at different frequencies.
I automated the speed and size of the samples so that I could go from a high-frequency-electronic-stock-market-crash effect to a fragmented-toilet-gurgle-of-lost-revenue sound in a fraction of a second with a controller. I hope you will enjoy listening to this sound more that watching your savings evaporate.
Ever get yelled at by your parents for blowing bubbles through your straw? Well, now it’s my job to blow bubbles through a straw. For this recording I blew bubbles in a glass of water (not Guinness as the photo suggests) while recording the results. I used this sound to create the underwater atmosphere for Aaron Dabelow’s 3D animated short, “Drown”. You can hear the pitched and processed version in the post, Water Atmosphere. There’s also a link to the movie in the post.
I have yet to use this recording for anything. I made it about a year ago when I was working on the sound design for a 3D animated short. It was one of many sounds that didn’t make the cut, but still has an interesting characteristic or two. We’re all familiar with the sheet metal wobble. The plastic mat wobble is similar, but with less racket and a sort of low frequency rubbery quality. I must have been holding my breath during the recording because you can hear me breathe in deeply at the end.
Here’s another sound that I would label as “Pro-One Dub”. I guess all that really means is knob turning and delay, but when you get good results with this instrument you know it. I love the fact that you cannot store presets on old analog gear. It makes you create a new sound every time you turn it on. I had the knobs in a pretty good position to start this time, but after a few more adjustments I got this great modulated effect with the LFO near top speed and at maximum amount. Just tapping a key gave me this nice squirty raygun effect, so I dropped that in the track before getting my sound for the melodic line I needed for the piece. Here’s a chunk of it pitched down a bit and running through a short delay with lots of feedback to create a vintage raygun effect.
I have been busy today working on four or five separate mixes and managed to finalize two of them, maybe. We’ll see how my ears respond after some rest. Anyway, during the last bit of work I was doing I noticed that one of the processor chains was causing insteresting random sounds whenever I pressed stop in Ableton Live. I decided to capture some of these sounds and see if they might be useful in the track.
Live has a great “resample” feature, but it was no use it this case because the only way to create the sound was by pressing stop and when you do that it stops recording. So I opened up Audacity and attempted to route the output from Live into it. After about five minutes I realized this wasn’t working and turned to the web for an answer. I quickly came across Soundflower (Cycling ’74), a “Free Inter-application Audio Routing Utility for Mac OS X”. This allowed me to route the audio to Audacity as I performed starting and stopping in Live. Here’s an edited version of the results. Warning: I normalized the render and it starts out extremely loud.
To create this sound I took the bubbles sound from yesterday and programmed it into a simple sampling VST. I built a pattern of chords in a MIDI clip that covered a wide range of frequencies for the sample simultaneously. This created a sort of spectrum of pitches. The next step was to spread that spectrum of pitches by resampling the output in a processor called Fragulator that effectively chops up the sample into fragments that can then be automatically looped at different frequencies. 
Ever get yelled at by your parents for blowing bubbles through your straw? Well, now it’s my job to blow bubbles through a straw. For this recording I blew bubbles in a glass of water (not Guinness as the photo suggests) while recording the results. I used this sound to create the underwater atmosphere for Aaron Dabelow’s 3D animated short, “Drown”. You can hear the pitched and processed version in the post, 
I have yet to use this recording for anything. I made it about a year ago when I was working on the sound design for a 3D animated short. It was one of many sounds that didn’t make the cut, but still has an interesting characteristic or two. We’re all familiar with the sheet metal wobble. The plastic mat wobble is similar, but with less racket and a sort of low frequency rubbery quality. I must have been holding my breath during the recording because you can hear me breathe in deeply at the end.
Here’s another sound that I would label as “Pro-One Dub”. I guess all that really means is knob turning and delay, but when you get good results with this instrument you know it. I love the fact that you cannot store presets on old analog gear. It makes you create a new sound every time you turn it on. I had the knobs in a pretty good position to start this time, but after a few more adjustments I got this great modulated effect with the LFO near top speed and at maximum amount. Just tapping a key gave me this nice squirty raygun effect, so I dropped that in the track before getting my sound for the melodic line I needed for the piece. Here’s a chunk of it pitched down a bit and running through a short delay with lots of feedback to create a vintage raygun effect.
I have been busy today working on four or five separate mixes and managed to finalize two of them, maybe. We’ll see how my ears respond after some rest. Anyway, during the last bit of work I was doing I noticed that one of the processor chains was causing insteresting random sounds whenever I pressed stop in