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.
As I mentioned before I have GMS setup to produce specific scales. At this stage they are all based on the key of C. Eventually I’ll set up the application so that the key and scale are dynamically adjustable. I will also include a wider variety of scales, including all the modes, diminished, whole tone, and more.
I should probably pass the source code for that sequencer bank I created on to you, it might give you some ideas about how to implement some tempo mechanisms. One thing I found is that that timing mechanism needs to be in another thread, otherwise it will never really stay synced up. Plus the key and scale stuff I already did once too, I’d hate to see someone have to go through it again :)
Thanks, Grant. I’ve already got the key and scale stuff under control. I think I will stick with my frame rate and multiplier technique for now and work in the clock at a later date. Also, it looks like the proMIDI library has a mechanism to set the tempo in BPM, so I may look at using it rather than rwmidi. If I get stuck or it seems too time consuming, I may take you up on your offer. Thanks!
Cool, can’t wait to see it!
Perhaps one way to get note duration more dynamically would be to get the total number of pixels in a frame above say 50% brightness and normalise to a reasonable duration. This way, it would be possible to control duration by twisting your hand so that different amounts of it are visible to the camera.
I really like that idea, Nick. Thanks for your input. Of course this would mean that the timing and tempo would be difficult (nearly impossible) to match to other performers, but perhaps I’ll set it up with a “tempo mode” that bases the duration on beats per minutes, and a “free mode” that uses some algorithm based on pixel brightness for note durations.
You could also have a hybrid mode in which note ons and / or note offs are quantised, potentially combining the expressiveness of one and collaborative potential of the other.