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.
Now that I have a title for the piece in my last entry, I may as well post a segment from a different layer. This is the main melody. It’s a section of Rhodes Electric Piano that I recorded back in 2005 while testing a live looping technique in Ableton. Today my plan was to find a random clip and run it through some complicated filtering delay and then post the results. Later that same day I completed Forgotten Complex. Currently I have about fourteen different pieces in various states of completion, all as a side effect of my contributions to the One Sound Every Day project.
This segment of percussion is from a new piece I started on today. To get this sound I used a similar filtering technique that I described in Hummingbird Morse Code on a percussion loop that I had pitched up about two octaves. When pitching up that far on a warped clip in Ableton Live the audio takes on a ratchet like tone. Adding the filtering after that created some low resonant sweeps that add some bass frequencies to the track. I haven’t named the piece yet, so this segment is simply titled Percussion Track, although unlike any percussion I have heard.
Recently I stumbled across an archive of a late night Keston and Westdal jam session buried in a dark, moldy and neglected sub-folder. I looped two bars and put a fade at the end, but otherwise left it untouched. It consists of bass guitar (Nils Westdal), a breakbeat, and myself on Wurlitzer Electric Piano. More specifically a Wurlitzer Electric Piano packaged by Musitronic for use as a student model. I picked this one up in the mid-90’s for a couple hundred dollars. I don’t use it that much since I prefer the sound of the Rhodes, but I think this particular recording is a nice example of the Wurly sound.
A friend sent me this link to an animated piece done on public walls in Buenos Aires and it was just too good not to post here. Fortunately, the piece is fitting for this venue due to the quality of the audio involved.
The animation is amazing, but one of the things I like especially about this piece is the sound design and music. It’s starts deceptively with typical city ambiance, but when the animation begins it quickly changes into a combination of experimental music and clever sound design carefully synchronized to the visuals.
More information about the artist and examples of their work can be found at blublu.org. The animation is by BLU assisted by Sibe, and the music / sound design is by Andrea Martignoni.
One of the things I do frequently, either for the sake of experimentation or for inspiration, is to apply multiple levels of processing with the intent of significantly manipulating an otherwise mundane sound. With a myriad of audio effects available to us this is also a good exercise in learning how certain kinds of processing impacts audio.
I started with a loop of hand drums going through Fragulator (Pluggo). Fragulator fragments the input signal into chunks, similar to grain-table synthesis. The chunks are looped at varying speeds to create a broad variety of effects. It was already drastically different from the original, so I chose to add only one more device. Harmonic Filter (Pluggo again) controls twenty-five filters with a cellular automata algorithm. I used its filter sweep mechanism to spread the stereo spectrum and provide tonal variety over the 1:25 minute recording.
Now that I have a title for the piece in my last entry, I may as well post a segment from a different layer. This is the main melody. It’s a section of Rhodes Electric Piano that I recorded back in 2005 while testing a live looping technique in Ableton. Today my plan was to find a random clip and run it through some complicated filtering delay and then post the results. Later that same day I completed Forgotten Complex. Currently I have about fourteen different pieces in various states of completion, all as a side effect of my contributions to the One Sound Every Day project. 
This segment of percussion is from a new piece I started on today. To get this sound I used a similar filtering technique that I described in 
Recently I stumbled across an archive of a late night 
One of the things I do frequently, either for the sake of experimentation or for inspiration, is to apply multiple levels of processing with the intent of significantly manipulating an otherwise mundane sound. With a myriad of audio effects available to us this is also a good exercise in learning how certain kinds of processing impacts audio.