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.
If you had a chance to hear Johannes Kreidler’s piece, Product Placement, made up of 70,200 samples in 0:33 seconds, then you probably thought is sounded a lot like radio static. To me it sounds like parts of it were time compressed and probably up-pitched, but altogether quite an achievement. Although, you might find the style of Akufen’s piece, Deck the House, more musical.
Rather than time compress the radio static I posted yesterday, I had a go at time expanding it. Time expansion works by stretching waveforms without changing the pitch. This can have some odd results when time expanding by a significant amount. You will often hear a repetitive stuttering, or garbled effect, like what’s happening in this example. In the image you can see the garbled sections represented as rectangular patterns that occur throughout the waveform.
As I have mentioned in previous articles, I love knobs. This includes the tuning knob on AM/FM radios. For today’s sound I decided to record my old Panasonic tuner. I took a mono direct signal into my M-Audio Firewire 410 and started tuning. What I was after is that static sound between stations, and the tiny chunks of speech and music that pop through as one spins the dial. I started with FM, switched to AM, and then back to FM recording close to ten minutes worth of audio. This particular tuner wasn’t much good for producing the gliding theremin like tones you sometimes hear, but I got some good static and random micro-clips of music and speech. Here’s a snapshot of one of the sections I’m satisfied with.
Nils Westdal and I recorded these bells for a percussive element in one of those tracks that have yet to see the light day. These beautiful solid brass bells have more than twenty seconds of decay. We recorded nineteen of those seconds. We used an AKG c4000b large diaphragm condenser microphone to capture the sound. The c4000b is one of the most versatile and sensitive mics I’ve used. It’s perfect for capturing all that sustain and high frequency goodness. Take a deep breath, cross your legs, close your eyes and press play.
To create this sound I started by programming a beat. In this case I pitched each slice of the beat individually to create a variety of pitches in the loop. Once I was satisfied with it I rendered it to a clip and applied a plugin by Paul Kellett (MDA) called Tracker, distributed by smartelectronix. Tracker tracks the frequency of a sample with a waveform, such as a sine wave, and then allows you to transpose, slide between pitches, adjust the mix and so on.
Running drums through Tracker can create some interesting and unpredictable melodies. At the start of this clip I left the mix at 100%, only hearing the melody created by the pitches tracked, then adjusted it down to zero by the end so you can hear what the beat sounds like without the pitch tracking. In front of Tracker I added Beat Repeat and turned it on a couple of times to generate some fills. I touched it up with some tempo delay mixed in here and there for some dub flavor.
A rarely tapped resource for me are clips found in the sound file folders of Ableton Live sets I use for performances. My group Keston and Westdal use two laptops running Live synchronized using a MIDI network. We usually play instruments during our performances and use the laptops for live looping and triggering loops and “scenes” as we construct the arrangements during the show. Our drummer gets a click so we can we can leave out or bring in sound from the laptops as we like. This way we can have purely live instrumentation intermingled with sequenced and live looped audio. It’s a bit of a learning curve to perform this way, but very liberating once you get it down.
This short sample of a guitar chord was played by my good friend Jason Cameron based in Seattle. While jamming together last June, 2008 I captured a few of his phrases in one of my Live sets, and came across it today while browsing through the sound file folders, looking for something to post. I dumped it back in Live, resisted the urge to reverse it, and added distortion, delay and reverb for a little texture.
If you had a chance to hear Johannes Kreidler’s piece, Product Placement, made up of 70,200 samples in 0:33 seconds, then you probably thought is sounded a lot like radio static. To me it sounds like parts of it were time compressed and probably up-pitched, but altogether quite an achievement. Although, you might find the style of Akufen’s piece, Deck the House, more musical. 
As I have mentioned in previous articles, I love knobs. This includes the tuning knob on AM/FM radios. For today’s sound I decided to record my old Panasonic tuner. I took a mono direct signal into my M-Audio Firewire 410 and started tuning. What I was after is that static sound between stations, and the tiny chunks of speech and music that pop through as one spins the dial. I started with FM, switched to AM, and then back to FM recording close to ten minutes worth of audio. This particular tuner wasn’t much good for producing the gliding theremin like tones you sometimes hear, but I got some good static and random micro-clips of music and speech. Here’s a snapshot of one of the sections I’m satisfied with.
Nils Westdal and I recorded these bells for a percussive element in one of those tracks that have yet to see the light day. These beautiful solid brass bells have more than twenty seconds of decay. We recorded nineteen of those seconds. We used an AKG c4000b large diaphragm condenser microphone to capture the sound. The c4000b is one of the most versatile and sensitive mics I’ve used. It’s perfect for capturing all that sustain and high frequency goodness. Take a deep breath, cross your legs, close your eyes and press play. 
To create this sound I started by programming a beat. In this case I pitched each slice of the beat individually to create a variety of pitches in the loop. Once I was satisfied with it I rendered it to a clip and applied a plugin by Paul Kellett (