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.
Tonight I’ve decided to share another of my first few Sony PCM-D50 test recordings. It is simply the sound of filling my bathroom sink partway with cold and then the rest of the way with hot water followed by the much quieter sound of the water draining down the plug hole. These sorts of mundane sounds are especially interesting to me once they have been recorded and taken out their context. Do we ever really listen to the sounds things make while we go about our daily lives? Probably not. And for good reason. If we were distracted by the qualities of the typical sounds in our environments we would never survive as a species. Our hearing is tuned to alert us when we hear irregular or unusual sounds. To my ears, ordinary sounds become extraordinary when I focus on listening to them.
Here’s a little clip that I made with my Sony PCM-D50 while in Puerto Rico. I captured some Coqui frogs at night from our hotel. You can hear some noise in the background. That’s the ocean and closer there was a lion head water fountain.
http://musicformotion.com/coqui_frog_clip.mp3
Here’s the view from my recording spot.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/10866706@N02/1806238559/in/set-72157602805791728/
I’m loving this PCM-D50. This recorder, in my opinion is the best on the market for the money. Super clean audio, easy to use, professional feel and great features. Next up I’ve got to try an old Sony mic that I have that has plug-in power.
Great sound, Jeff. Thanks for posting. I’m really digging the PCM-D50 too. One thing I’d like to do is figure out a cabling solution for stereo mics like the Shure VP88. My AT822 came with an 1/8″ stereo adapter, but the VP88s would need dual XLR to single 1/8″ stereo. I have not been able to find an adapter, so I might end up building one.
Of course, moments after posting that comment I decided to have another look and found this:
http://store.microphonemadness.com/mmdualxlrfem.html
Yes I think that’s the same place that I found an adaptor to (try to) connect my Rode NT4 to the first gen MicroTrack. In the end that was a bad combo. The MicroTrack never supplied full phantom power to get things right and running the NT4 off 9V batteries was pretty noisy. M-Audio, I should have known better. Ahhh, now that is all in the past.
I live 2 blocks from the ocean on the NJ shore. I’ll probably catch some ocean sounds in the next couple of days. Then on to putting this thing to work and creating some sample sets for Kontakt. First up is prepared Ukulele.
They look like an intersting vendor. While browsing some of their other gear their pre-amps looked interesting as well as the twelve varieties of mini binaural mics.
Ah, the PCM-D50 works great for ocean sounds. I grabbed this off the Puget Sound recently.