Gestural Music Sequencer Documentary Short

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Josh Clos produced this documentary short about the GMS recently. He and his colleagues Julie Kistler and Brian Smith shot video during my performance in Downtown Minneapolis with Minneapolis Art on Wheels on May 13, 2009. Later Josh interviewed me in the audio studio at Art Institutes Minnesota where I teach interactive media and audio production. As a student in my audio production class, Josh edited the sound and video together with minimal input from myself. His short illustrates what the GMS does and how I’ve been using it to compose music in real-time. Thanks, Josh, for a job well done!

Speaking of the GMS, I have recently slowed down its development, and I’m considering releasing a beta version of the application in a few months. Soon afterward I plan to release the code as Open Source so that the application can be developed further by artists interested in creating music through gestural input.

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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.

12 thoughts on “Gestural Music Sequencer Documentary Short”

  1. Agreed. Great job Josh!

    And congrats John. This is a great introduction and press piece for the GMS. I can already see it on the front page for its website when released. Such a great thing to release it as Open Source. Can’t wait to get a PC render?!?!

  4. I find this an inspiration. To my mind this is part of a change in music-making that will open up the process to many more people. It becomes an expression of intuition and discovery rather than (for example) rote learning of notes. I look forward to exploring the beta version when it comes out. Congratulations on your creation. It’s brilliant!

  5. About a month ago, I wrote a little program in processing that took in webcam input and outputted sound. I hadn’t heard of GMS at the time, but it ended up sounding quite similar (at least to the sounds in the video!) I ended up sending midi data to electric piano-ish instruments in Live, as it sounds like you did at least for the song in the video.

    Of course, GMS seems far more advanced, with many more features and greater control. Mine was a pretty simple program; basically it had three channels, for R, G and B. It based the pitch on the brightness, then the volume on the saturation of that color component in the frame.

    I eagerly await the release of GMS!

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  7. Pingback: Audio Cookbook » Blog Archive » GMS Beta Release, September 28, 2009

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  11. hi there :) I’m very excited to started using the GMS but it does not recognize my webcam. I’m running Vista and have a logitech 200 webcam. Perhaps the program only reads certain devices, but I couldn’t find documentation on this. Thanks for any advice you can give!
    Mandy

  12. @mandy. Grant Muller posted some detailed instructions on how to use the GMS with Windows. As a Mac user I haven’t attempted it. You’ll have to go a few pages into the comments to find his documentation. Just search for Grant. Cheers!

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