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.
How was the lock up with the video text elements done? Motion math type plug in for After Effects is what comes to mind from back in the day…
Nice work!!! Keep it up!
I’ll let Jawara answer that, but it was done with some sort of audio analysis in After Effects.
I created this based upon a tutorial from videocopilot.net.
First, I had to put each instrument on a separate track because the below method only tracks the change in volume and not the actual instrument sound.
Then, I used the treble and bass effect in After Effects. While it was on my audio track, I took the audio keyframe data and transfered it to scale,position,opacity and rotation using expressions.
The most difficult thing was probably editing the expression so the variables would work for the specific attribute. For example if I wanted to apply it to opacity I might have to divide the whole expression by 5 since the numbers might range from 50 to 500 and opacity is a percentage ranging from 1% to 100%.
Thanks, and Im glad you guys liked it! :)
Wow, that’s a lot of work! Reminds me of syncing up the old Performer, a Yamaha Disklavier, and a SMPTE-striped 4-track tape recorder – back in the old days!