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.
The cellular automata known as the “Game of Life” originated from work done in 1970 by British mathematician John Horton Conway. Curious about how the game of life sequencer would react to documented patterns, I drew several of them into the sequencer and captured the MIDI output in Ableton Live. In order to use the documented patterns I changed the grid to thirteen by thirteen squares so I could match the patterns exactly. I got some variable musical phrases as a result. A very symmetrical sequence was produced by the pulsar (pictured). Starting the sequencer with the pulsar created a simple, rigid one half bar pattern before all the cells died. Afterward I ran the MIDI into a virtual instrument, looped it, and applied processing to get today’s sound.
That is incredibly cool. What sequencer were you using? Was this done in Processing? So far the CA->MIDI experiments I’ve done in Processing have produced irregular results, nothing like this.
This was done in Processing using the Game of Life sequencer that’s posted on the Ruin & Wesen site (http://ruinwesen.com/). I also wrote about it in the previous post (https://audiocookbook.org/one-sound-every-day/sine-of-life/). I must admit that I applied automation to the cutoff frequency to give it some variance. Thanks!
Yeah, my feedreader sorts newest to oldest…I didn’t get back that far when I wrote that comment :) I built this a while ago, but am extending it to work a little differently, I’ll post a comment here when I’m done