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.
This recording was made with a Shure VP88 stereo condenser mic on a Fostex FR-2LE field recorder as I was leaving work this evening. I usually exit out of a back stairwell with cement steps and brick walls. In other words, loads of natural sound reverberation.
The audio starts as I open the door to the stairwell. First I ascended two flights, turned around and descended four. I then opened the door to the outside alley and parking lot, where I was greeted with post-rainfall, nighttime, city ambiance. I crossed the street to my bike where two workers packed up their tools in their van. Then I pressed stop, packed up my gear and rode home.
While recording I enabled the bass roll-off on the mic. Then I ran the 48kHz 24bit digital recording through a compressor at 4:1 to reduce some of the transient peaks and bring out some of the background noises. I also normalized it during the render to maximize the volume.
Tonight I shot a video in an alley in Northeast Minneapolis as a thunder storm rolled in. I shot it with my mobile phone and then converted it to a wav file for today’s sound. Rather than inlcude the video I have put the audio here after compressing it as an mp3. I also included a shot of the storm clouds as I saw them. In the beginning of the recording I hear some chimes then the wind overdrives the mic a bit. On the whole, the recording seems to be made of mostly wind noise.
Here’s a technique that I stumbled across while experimenting. Sometimes I like to put a micro sample (a sample that is a fraction of a second in length) through a massive reverb. This particular sample is perhaps a tenth of a second of music from an old television commerical. When I do this it’s usually on its own track with lots of other stuff going on around it.
This example is the micro sample through the reverb alone so you can hear the texture that it creates. Most of the time I will run it through a high pass filter before it gets to the reverb, and in this case I’m also running it through a slowly modulating auto filter so that it has a slightly different timbre each time it occurs. Hearing this alone makes evident a high frequency overtone that starts to ring throughout the recording. You can hear the same sample in context in the track Electric Sheep that I linked in this post.
I created this track using Tiction (recently featured on CDM), an interesting piece of MIDI sequencing software created by Hans Kuder and developed in Processing. Tiction works by connecting nodes together to form loops. Each node has properties that can be adjusted like the number of “tics”. Dragging the nodes around the screen changes the pitch and volume of the nodes. I routed the MIDI output from Tiction into MDA’s DX10 while dragging and adjusting the nodes on the screen. After capturing the output I processed it through Pluggo’s Comber and a little bit of reverb. Here I have rendered the first fifty seconds as an excerpt for today’s sound.
I’m too busy to produce any new sounds today, so here’s a track off Keston and Westdal’s second release, Truth is Stranger, for your listening pleasure. My best estimation is that we produced this track back in 2004, but the album wasn’t released until we partnered with Unearthed Music in March, 2007. The track’s name, 128 Dirty, is an example of one of those working titles that doesn’t go away. We must have used up all our creativity on producing the track and had nothing left to name the damn thing. You can preview all of the tracks on this album on the releases page at Unearthed Music, or just click on the image or title to go to the page specifically for Truth is Stranger.
This recording was made with a Shure VP88 stereo condenser mic on a Fostex FR-2LE field recorder as I was leaving work this evening. I usually exit out of a back stairwell with cement steps and brick walls. In other words, loads of natural sound reverberation. 
Tonight I shot a video in an alley in Northeast Minneapolis as a thunder storm rolled in. I shot it with my mobile phone and then converted it to a wav file for today’s sound. Rather than inlcude the video I have put the audio here after compressing it as an mp3. I also included a shot of the storm clouds as I saw them. In the beginning of the recording I hear some chimes then the wind overdrives the mic a bit. On the whole, the recording seems to be made of mostly wind noise. 
Here’s a technique that I stumbled across while experimenting. Sometimes I like to put a micro sample (a sample that is a fraction of a second in length) through a massive reverb. This particular sample is perhaps a tenth of a second of music from an old television commerical. When I do this it’s usually on its own track with lots of other stuff going on around it. 
