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.
As you may know, Nils Westdal and I make up the production team, Keston and Westdal. We have a variety of production techniques, but no matter how we are working, we end up with dozens of ideas that don’t get fully developed.
Every so often we review these ideas and consider revisiting pieces that are interesting, but most of the time they collect virtual dust on backup drives. Here’s an example of one of the ideas that have been sitting in limbo; in this case, since October 6, 2005.
I took the liberty of minimally arranging the parts and mixing the instruments, but I have added no processing. The entire mix is in mono with no panning or EQ. The bass guitar is running through an outboard phaser, so I soloed it for the outro so you can hear how that sounds.
Today I was digging through my recording archives and came across a nice example of me running my Rhodes through a wah wah pedal with a little overdrive on it. So not being one to leave well enough alone, I sequenced the recording into a short phrase at 90 bpm.
I started by pitching a couple of the chords to create a progression, then added some delay and reverb to give it a nice cinematic ambiance. Perhaps I’ll build a track out it at some point. It reminds me of something from the soundtrack for the Fantastic Planet. By the way, the image is a photo of one of my Rhodes electric pianos. I own three of these very special instruments. Two of them I use for live performances, while the suitcase model in the photo stays put in my studio.
So, what do I do with all these samples of different mallets on piano strings, and other areas of the instrument? How about putting them all into a drum machine? Better yet, a virtual drum machine, like Ableton’s Impulse. In this example I have selected some percussive sounds as well as some tonal samples and tuned everything to work together, then created a simple beat with the samples. Key parameters in setting up Impulse included, pitch, decay, filter, frequency, resonance and mode.
Here’s another example of using a mallet to get sounds out of my piano. In this case, instead of striking the main part of the string, I let the mallet bounce on the small piece of string after the bridge. This part of the piano is traditionally not used to create sound and the pitches are quite high and not tuned, similar to the area between the tuning pegs and the nut of a guitar.
The result is a microtonal collection of tones that just slightly vary in pitch as I drag the mallet across the strings. There is also a warm low frequency ambiance to the recording created by the natural resonance of the piano.
This dissonant phrase of piano was created by using a metal mallet to gently taps the stings on the piano in the upper register. I’ve been experimenting with getting some unique sounds out of my piano by not using the keyboard.
Not all of these recordings are dissonant or unsettling, but these kind of techniques lend themselves to creating nice suspenseful or disturbing passages. Eventually I’ll post some excerpts of some pieces I have created using these sounds.
As you may know, Nils Westdal and I make up the production team, Keston and Westdal. We have a variety of production techniques, but no matter how we are working, we end up with dozens of ideas that don’t get fully developed. 
Today I was digging through my recording archives and came across a nice example of me running my Rhodes through a wah wah pedal with a little overdrive on it. So not being one to leave well enough alone, I sequenced the recording into a short phrase at 90 bpm. 
So, what do I do with all these samples of different mallets on piano strings, and other areas of the instrument? How about putting them all into a drum machine? Better yet, a virtual drum machine, like 
Here’s another example of using a mallet to get sounds out of my piano. In this case, instead of striking the main part of the string, I let the mallet bounce on the small piece of string after the bridge. This part of the piano is traditionally not used to create sound and the pitches are quite high and not tuned, similar to the area between the tuning pegs and the nut of a guitar. 
This dissonant phrase of piano was created by using a metal mallet to gently taps the stings on the piano in the upper register. I’ve been experimenting with getting some unique sounds out of my piano by not using the keyboard.