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.
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That’s pretty interesting. Can you simulate instruments on that? You should try changing the pitch to pressure and volume to velocity. Or maybe if you could have the Y axis change pitch, pressure for volume, and velocity could manipulate some effect like reverb or distortion. Of course that wouldn’t be as much like drawing, but it would make an interesting instrument. I have no idea if you have the capabilities to do such things, but you should if you can.
I like this patch. It seems to be responding to the stylus faster than the LCD response in my patches. I have timed the average response time for output from the LCD at about 30 ms ( using Max and XP ) and have not been able to improve that. I think the response time to accurately record the actions of an artist drawing has to be less than 10 ms. I am wondering if it is worth trying to hack Max to mess with the polling speed for LCD.
@David, Actually I’m not polling the LCD object, but grabbing the Wacom data directly from the Wacom external. Perhaps that polls faster than the LCD object, because I’m not sensing anywhere near 30 ms of latency. 10 at the most.
Just when I was hittig a wall — another avenue to explore ! I love playing with all these Max widgets.
Can we play with it? :D
@Panchito I’m going to be working on this project again soon, so perhaps I’ll upload it for those interested in checking it out.
Cool, thank you :D
hello, i have a suggestion. is it possible that you can replace the sound with pencil drawing sound? I think it would be really nice software and digital artist would love this software.
it like something similar to Mechvibes , a software that have sound for the keyboard. And people now is asking for the mice sound as well, but no one had done it yet. (at now 2021)
Hi Alexandra, that would be possible. I no longer have a Wacom tablet and this project is no longer active, but I think you’re right about it being an interesting approach!