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.
Here is another recently produced example of processing sound with Photoshop via Photosounder. In this instance I applied the Halftone Pattern filter under the Distort sub menu.
Interesting indeed! I’d say the short noises sound interesting because instead of being sort of uniform noises, they’re modulated with the pattern, and therefore sound more like it. So basically you’re applying how the half tone pattern would sound on its own to the dialogue sound itself.
Which gives me an idea, another one that I wonder why I never thought about before. Basically you came up with time-frequency domain modulation, which I guess is a new thing in itself, instead of modulating with something graphical that has a limited interest in sound, you could modulate other sounds instead! Not just any sound, consider this : let’s say you make an interesting, church organ-like sound, let’s say with a short progression of sorts that repeats quickly, basically, a “sound texture” if you will. Save the image of that sound texture, and in Photoshop, paste it on top of the image of your dialogue, use the Multiply blending mode so that it modulates, save the result and synthesise the result, preferably in lossless mode. Depending on how your “sound texture” sounds, you could obtain some absolutely great effect!
By the way, is this example in lossless mode? I can’t even tell! :)
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Not sure exactly what it means, but I love the sound of the term “time-frequency domain modulation”. Nice one, Michel! Oh, yeah… I don’t think I used the lossless mode on this one.