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.
I can’t seem to get enough robot action these days. Robots have lots of personality. Much more than politicians who convene in St. Paul. I used a similar technique to get this sound as I did for Robot Music. This time, however, I did a bit of processing after the fact, including pitching the recording down thirteen steps. Why thirteen? Because thirteen is a cool number. It’s subversive and pagan and not a floor in lots of buildings. I also added some standard reverberation and automated up some delay at the end to please my sense of aural space.
Having been asked on more than one occasion, it is about time that I posted a sound from one of my favorite synthesizers, the Sequential Circuits Pro-One. This is actually two layered tracks of sounds I made with the Pro-One today in a session with Nils Westdal. The sounds are effects for a dub track at 73 beats per minute. I ran them through a couple of tempo delays and reverb to create some atmosphere. Even after using this instrument for more than ten years I still manage to get new sounds out of it. Perhaps it’s the unpredictability of the analogue oscillators and filters, or the fact that you cannot store presets, in any case it seems to breathe and even sometimes cough as if it needs to wake up a bit before behaving consistently. The short story is that this simple mono-synth from the early 1980’s has a lot of character.
I produced this sound by playing one note in a virtual instrument called “Harmonic Dreamz” which is part of Pluggo by Cycling74. After that I automated random patch changes so that all of the twenty eight parameters included in the Harmonic Dreamz instrument were flying all over the place creating a frenetic passage of electronic mayhem. Then I arpeggiated the note with some slight randomness to the pattern and ended up with this.
To me it sounds as if it could be speech or perhaps singing in a robot language. I recorded several examples of it. Some of the other examples have slight variations and others have significant variations, so I may post some other versions at some point. This recording is in mono with no processing. The output is exactly what the virtual instrument produced given the parameters sent to the device.
I looped this section of radio static where I was quickly swapping between two channels of music with the analogue dial. Although cacophonous, it has a strangely attractive rhythmic and musical quality to it. So, of course that led me to experiment with some processing. I did not want to manipulate it too much so I could illustrate the drunken quality to the passage as it repeats, but I added a short, modulated, stereo delay to create some imaging on the mono recording. After that I decided to map a couple of controllers to the left and right feedback of the delay, allowing me to over saturate the output dynamically over the recording’s one minute and six seconds duration.
For some reason, the AM (amplitude modulated) radio static that I recorded recently is much noisier than the FM (frequency modulated) static. The noise is also at a lower frequency than the FM noise which makes sense since the FM band is at a higher frequency than the AM band. The AM band is in the kilohertz range (535 to 1705kHz) while the FM band is in the megahertz range (87.5 to 108 MHz). In any case, I think you will find this recording familiar.
I can’t seem to get enough robot action these days. Robots have lots of personality. Much more than politicians who convene in St. Paul. I used a similar technique to get this sound as I did for Robot Music. This time, however, I did a bit of processing after the fact, including pitching the recording down thirteen steps. Why thirteen? Because thirteen is a cool number. It’s subversive and pagan and not a floor in lots of buildings. I also added some standard reverberation and automated up some delay at the end to please my sense of aural space. 
Having been asked on more than one occasion, it is about time that I posted a sound from one of my favorite synthesizers, the 
I produced this sound by playing one note in a virtual instrument called “Harmonic Dreamz” which is part of 
I looped this section of radio static where I was quickly swapping between two channels of music with the analogue dial. Although cacophonous, it has a strangely attractive rhythmic and musical quality to it. So, of course that led me to experiment with some processing. I did not want to manipulate it too much so I could illustrate the drunken quality to the passage as it repeats, but I added a short, modulated, stereo delay to create some imaging on the mono recording. After that I decided to map a couple of controllers to the left and right feedback of the delay, allowing me to over saturate the output dynamically over the recording’s one minute and six seconds duration. 
For some reason, the AM (amplitude modulated) radio static that I recorded recently is much noisier than the FM (frequency modulated) static. The noise is also at a lower frequency than the FM noise which makes sense since the FM band is at a higher frequency than the AM band. The AM band is in the kilohertz range (535 to 1705kHz) while the FM band is in the megahertz range (87.5 to 108 MHz). In any case, I think you will find this recording familiar.