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.
One of the very first tests I made using my DIY binaural mics was this example of back alley ambiance. I stood as still as possible because this first version of the headset had a stiff cable that was very sensitive to vibrations. Birds and traffic are the most obvious sounds, but there is a high pitched screeching going on throughout the recording that became even more noticeable after applying normalization. While making the recording I actually took the mics out of my ears to make sure they weren’t generating the tone and I knew I wasn’t going crazy when it turned up in the recording. The sound is either a near by train, or a neighbor using a power tool. It sounds more like a tool, but the freight trains that go through my neighborhood make some very similar sounds to this.
My god, it sounds like you live in a rainforest. With trains.
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sure you weren’t getting scalar freqs from power lines? sounds like interference. thanks, i’m hip
You know, I never thought of that, but if I remember correctly I was hearing the sound as I made the recording. Is it possible that the mic capsules in my ears actually picked up the interference and made it audible? Might be an interesting experiment to try and measure it.