About John CS Keston

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.

Culled and Shifted

This is a rough rendering of a short piece of sound that is part of a larger dance piece that is being produced by Annichia Arts. I’ll explain more about the piece at a later date. A shorter, less processed version of the piece was posted here.

Culled and Shifted

Wired: Installation lets you remix actor’s face and voice

On Wednesday, November 16, 2011, Olivia Solon of Wired.co.uk wrote an article describing my piece, Voice Lessons. I have creativeapplications.net to thank for this one. Olivia found the article about my piece there and then emailed me to ask for a brief interview. We conducted the interview over email and the article was published the next day. Read the article by Filip Visnjic on Creative Applications Network. Read the article from Olivia Solon on Wired. Thanks, Filip and Olivia!

Video of Voice Lessons Touch Screen Installation

Voice Lessons is an electronic, audio device that interrogates the popular myth that every musical instrument imitates the human voice. Touching the screen allows the participant to manipulate the visuals and vocalizations of the “voice teacher” as he recites vocal warm up exercises.

The piece resides in the space between a musical instrument and voice lesson. Move the touch point left, right, up, and down to explore the visual and auditory possibilities. Rapid high pitched loops occur while touching near the top of the screen while lower pitched longer loops are heard near the bottom.

The actor, also named John Keston, is my retired father who became a voice teacher after a long career on stage in plays, operas, and musicals with the Royal Shakespeare Company in our native country England and abroad.

Voice Lessons
32” interactive touch screen installation
By John Keston 2011
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All Content Recovered (Unless Not)

After more than two months of spare time spent searching and replacing, all of the audio and image files that were lost in the crash have been recovered. It is possible that a few things have fallen through the cracks. I have been clicking “Visit Random Entry” to do occasional spot checks since wrapping up my data recovery todo list, and a couple of things have come up missing that way.

It has been interesting to revisit the old content, but I am ready to move on and get back to posting some of my latest projects. If you’d like to help out the recovery process, click the “Visit Random Entry” link in the right sidebar a few times, and if you find something that doesn’t play, or a missing image or video, please post a comment with a link to the post in question. Thanks!

Sound Sample from Voice Lessons

Voice Lessons is an interactive touch-screen installation that I recently presented during a graduate critique seminar at MCAD. The piece, developed in Max/MSP, granulates both sound and video as the viewer touches the screen while maintaining synchronization. I will be installing the piece again next month for an open studio night on December 9, 2011 at the MCAD Whittier Studios, 2835 Harriet Avenue South, Minneapolis. I will also be sharing more complete documentation about the piece soon. For now, please enjoy this short segment of audio sampled from the piece as it was in use.

Voice Lessons Excerpt