Studio Version of Spring in December

Posted on January 2, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

I would like to share another track from One Day to Save All Life. This was one of the first pieces completed for the album and set the tone for the rest of the collection. The atmosphere at the beginning is created with water and wildlife ambiance mixed with a passage of backwards Rhodes electric piano. At around two minutes into it the main theme is introduced which is a combination of Rhodes along with two synthesized oscillators tuned to fifths done with one of my favorite workhorses, the Korg MS2000.

Spring in December

Fe₂O₃ from One Day to Save All Life

Posted on January 1, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

For my first few entries in 2009 I would like to take a quick look back at music that I’ve been involved in in 2008. One of my favorite tracks from Keston and Westdal’s album One Day to Save All Life is Fe₂O₃ which we named after the chemical composition of iron oxide. This is the middle piece in a group of three gapless tracks on the album, so unfortunately it has an abrupt start and end. A much better way to hear it is in sequence with the previous and subsequent tracks in gapless format as it was mastered on the CD. In any case, I am fond of the abundant processing we used creating a textural atmosphere on this piece.

Fe₂O₃

Segment of New track at 84 bpm

Posted on December 30, 2008 by John C.S. Keston

Here’s a brief segment of a new track I’m working on. I don’t have much to say about it other than it’s at eighty four beats per minute and involves lots of processing. It is still untitled and far from complete, but I expect that it will be included on the album that I have committed to releasing this March on Unearthed Music. If you listen carefully you may recognize one of the layers as the sound from Octave Pedal Rhodes.

84 Octave (working title)

More Image to Sound Techniques: Mould by Nick Froud

Posted on December 29, 2008 by John C.S. Keston

Today’s fascinating sound is another example of the conversion of digital imagery into sound and was submitted by Manchester based artist Nick Froud. Nick writes:

“I have been following your blog for months and have found it really inspiring. The software featured in your most recent entry is quite similar to a program I (very quickly) put together for an exhibition idea I have. My girlfriend produces photography based and nature and process, I wanted to adopt these ideas into sound that could accompany each of her pictures in a gallery.

The program I made converts an image directly into sound by scanning along each pixel and outputting a sample to a wave file based on an average of the red, green and blue channels. It also outputs the red green and blue channels as CC data in a MIDI file. In this way, I intend to create music entirely generated from an image but with human direction as to choices of effects to be controlled by MIDI data, layering of sounds etc. The sound generated are much noisier than in other sound / image conversion applications, but I think it gives a better feel of the texture of an image.”