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 notes the fiftieth entry in my One Sound Every Day project. That’s fifty entries in as many days. I wasn’t sure I would be able to manage this task, considering all my other responsibilities and interests, but it’s been a fun and delightful journey. I have had to give up a few vices and a few positive things too. My piano practicing has suffered, but I don’t doubt that I will be able to remedy that eventually.
The good news is that the discipline involved in producing something every day has created a bi-product of about fourteen new pieces, and this was not even the goal of the project. So, to mark my fiftieth entry I have decided to let you hear an unreleased full-length rough mix of the first composition I have completed that is a result of contributions to One Sound Every Day. Please have a listen and feedback is always welcome.
I have been wanting to post an example of my talented friend Chris Huff throat singing for some time, so here it is in all its unprocessed monophonic glory. Throat singing or overtone singing is a technique that vocalists use to sing multiple pitches at the same time with a single voice and is often used in various religious chants in central Asia.
I refrained from dousing it with a Taj Mahal style reverberation setting in case anyone wants to use it, since I am placing in it in the Share Remix Adapt sample pool. See if you can identify how many pitches he is producing simultaneously. It’s a little difficult to discern because of the dissonant intervals.
The scene is a huge and deserted underground car park around 3am. You shut the door to your vehicle. the sound reverberates for almost a minute. What do you do? Do it again! I found myself in this position after a late evening out with my wife recently. Unfortunately all I had available to make a recording was my mobile phone. So, I set it to record and started opening and closing the door to my wife’s pickup truck, listening to the results. I knew the recording would suck, but I had to take a crack at it. As you may have heard, my wife thinks I’m crazy. As long as she doesn’t find out it’s true, I think I’m ok.
You may have thought that I have posted some random clips of audio on this site in the past. That is a fair statement, but tonight I have converted seventeen recordings I have made with my Sony Ericsson K800i mobile phone to .wav format. They are more nostalgic than useful so I won’t be posting all of them, but they do have a certain charm in an ultra lofi way.
The phone records sound at 16 bit. The sampling rate, on the other hand, is only 8 kHz – nowhere near the fidelity of standard audio CDs (44.1 kHz). So here is something on a pretty high magnitude of randomness: a drum jam I recorded at a little open air club in Playa del Carmen, Mexico back in March, 2007. The music was good. The tequila was better. The recording is awful. If you brave this one out, then you know what an 8 kHz phone recording sounds like.
This sound was captured accidentally in my living room as I fiddled about getting ready to record my piano. The hardwood floors created some serious low frequencies up the mic stand as I was moving around.
If you listen carefully, you can really hear the shape and temperature or the room. I added a significant amount of gain to get this into an audible range. Otherwise, it’s really just an example of a recording that I never intended to make.
Today notes the fiftieth entry in my One Sound Every Day project. That’s fifty entries in as many days. I wasn’t sure I would be able to manage this task, considering all my other responsibilities and interests, but it’s been a fun and delightful journey. I have had to give up a few vices and a few positive things too. My piano practicing has suffered, but I don’t doubt that I will be able to remedy that eventually. 
I have been wanting to post an example of my talented friend Chris Huff throat singing for some time, so here it is in all its unprocessed monophonic glory. Throat singing or overtone singing is a technique that vocalists use to sing multiple pitches at the same time with a single voice and is often used in various religious chants in central Asia. 
The scene is a huge and deserted underground car park around 3am. You shut the door to your vehicle. the sound reverberates for almost a minute. What do you do? Do it again! I found myself in this position after a late evening out with my wife recently. Unfortunately all I had available to make a recording was my mobile phone. So, I set it to record and started opening and closing the door to my wife’s pickup truck, listening to the results. I knew the recording would suck, but I had to take a crack at it. As you may have heard, my wife thinks I’m crazy. As long as she doesn’t find out it’s true, I think I’m ok. 
You may have thought that I have posted some random clips of audio on this site in the past. That is a fair statement, but tonight I have converted seventeen recordings I have made with my 
This sound was captured accidentally in my living room as I fiddled about getting ready to record my piano. The hardwood floors created some serious low frequencies up the mic stand as I was moving around.