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.
This short experiment was produced by programming a custom formant sequence into the infamous Yamaha FS1R. This is not possible to do with the unit alone, but there are some great tools that make it possible that I’ll discuss an upcoming article. A formant sequence essentially modulates the formant shaping operators on the FS1R modeled after the spectra from am audio signal. This patch repurposes a vocal track from my project Voice Lessons as the formant sequence.
I recently programmed this synthesized clavinet sound using the DSI Tempest. There are no samples involved, only analog oscillators. It turned out to be quite effective thanks to the speedy envelopes in the Tempest synthesis engine. I added a little reverb and delay to give it a little bit of space. I also used a sustain pedal on part of the phrase, something that you cannot do on a Hohner E7.
I just came across this animation of one of György Ligeti‘s few electronic compositions Artikulation (1958). This animated sequence puts my collaboration with Piotr Szyhalski, Post-prepared Piano, in historical context. The visuals for Ligeti’s piece were created by Rainer Wehinger in response to the music, while in Post-prepared Piano (see the animated sequence) the visuals are converted directly into an electronic version of an existing work through a computerized process.
Here’s a piece dedicated to our planet’s recent astroid near miss and “unrelated” spectacular meteor explosion. I went back to my roots and produced some psychedelic, dub-delayed business with a little arabesque-miami-vice in the middle. Please enjoy responsibly.
This is another excerpt from a performance by DKO from the MCAD MFA open studio night on December 7, 2012. The document features Oliver Grudem (not shown) who produced the audiovisual score in real-time. The video and sound coming from the LED display and loud speaker below it was broadcast into the performance space as Oliver walked around the Minneapolis Uptown area during a snow storm. Listen for traffic, footsteps, car horns, and the occasional blurt of humans speech. The visuals and sound from his walk provided a “score” for the ensemble to respond to as we improvised. Oliver was also able to hear the musical reactions to the audiovisual score as he was broadcasting and respond accordingly.
The piece was recorded with my custom built binaural head microphone (Vincent) to capture the sound localization of the performance space. Remember that it is necessary to wear high quality, circumaural headphones to experience the binaural effect. While watching, imagine you are in the same position as Vincent. You should hear the bass clarinet in your left ear, the Rhodes and synthesizers to the right and the drums and video sound in front. The relative height of the sound should also be noticeable.
