Vocalise Sintetica at Echofluxx 14, Prague

Posted on June 30, 2014 by John C.S. Keston

On May 7, 2014 I performed Vocalise Sintetica at the Echofluxx Festival in Prague. The piece is made up of four movements: I. Machines (00:00), II. Liquid (18:43), III. Vocalise (28:55), and, IV. Sintetica (38:41). Each movement is a playlist of five audiovisual objects that are instantly available to be projected and amplified while being granulated in real-time by a performer using a multitouch interface. The performer may loop their gestures applied to the audiovisual objects in order to bring in additional synthesized sound layers that contrast or mimic the audiovisual objects. My performance at Echofluxx was made possible by a grant from the American Composers Forum with funds provided by the Jerome Foundation.
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Audiovisual Granular Synthesis of Water Objects

Posted on June 19, 2014 by John C.S. Keston

This is a screen capture from a Max project I developed that does interactive, synchronized, granular synthesis of corresponding sound and video that’s tentatively titled AVGM for Audiovisual Grain Machine. I have used the software during aperformance at the Echofluxx festival in Prague and at the Katherine E. Nash gallery for the opening of The Audible Edge exhibition during Northern Spark 2014.

TV Takeover: Northern Lights.mn (Live Stream)

Posted on June 6, 2014 by John C.S. Keston

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Tonight I am going to be improvising electronic music on live television in reaction to projects presented by past and present Northern Spark artists. The event is hosted by Twin Cities Public Television and is open to the public with tickets available for the in studio event. Read more about the TV Takeover event or watch it live at the YouTube stream above. [Edit: the event is over, but the video is available above.]

Duet No. 2 With The Singing Ringing Tree

Posted on May 14, 2014 by John C.S. Keston

This was the second take on day one of my Duets recording project with the Singing Ringing Tree (SRT), a wind activated musical panopticon in Northern England. The sculpture was designed by architects Tonkin Liu and completed in December 2006. I performed accompaniment for the SRT binaural recording simultaneously using a Novation Bass Station II connected to a USB battery. I also ran the Bass Station II through a Moog Minifooger Delay. Eventually I will be producing videos of these compositions. For now I wanted to try a quick mix to get an idea of how things will sound.

NOTE: This is a binaural recording combined with a monophonic synthesizer track. Although it sounds great through speakers, circumaural headphones must be used to experience the binaural effect.

Audiovisual Grain Machine Demo

Posted on March 31, 2014 by John C.S. Keston

Here’s a quick demo of the software I am designing to do audiovisual granular synthesis that I’ll be presenting at Moogfest and performing with at Echofluxx. It allows a performer to apply granular synthesis to sound and corresponding video using a touch interface such as MIRA (shown). The audio and video are synchronized in parallel. The software also has the capability to capture and repeat gestures so that the performer can accompany the projections with multiple layers and arrange compositions in a performance setting. This demo granulates the voice and image of Lister Rossel. In addition I use analogue synthesizers to contrast the digital manipulations.

This work alludes to the speech-to-song illusion discovered by Diana Deutsch. It also evokes an “event fusion” as vocalizations are repeated much faster than humanly possible until they enter the audio range. Adding the corresponding visuals makes it appear uncanny as video and sound are looped in millisecond intervals.