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.
With help from my father who was visiting recently, I have built a new desk for my studio. The idea I had was to build a desk wide enough to build a keyboard drawer underneath. What I came up with was a simple design using three quarter inch plywood, quarter inch ply for the backing and one by three pine for a brace and attachments for the eighteen inch ball bearing drawer runners. The keyboard is a CME UF7 semi-weighted controller. 
It has made a huge difference in the ergonomics of my studio to have this controller readily available without having to have it take up extra space on a stand. Here’s a segment from a piece I wrote soon after putting the studio back together with the new desk. I’m using the CME to control my the grand piano patch on my Yamaha A3000 rack mount sampler. The Rhodes is my 1976 suitcase model that does not leave the studio.
Looks great! Nice new sounds, too. Looking forward to your solo release.
Um, can you post those plans, that is EXACTLY the kind of desk I’ve been looking for.
Hey Grant,
It was really simple. I used three pieces of 3/4″ plywood, setup like Stonehenge. Each piece was twenty inches in depth. The sides were each thirty inches tall. I based the width on the length of my keyboard. The only tricky bit was the drawer. I found a couple of heavy duty ball bearing runners eighteen inches in length and attached them to the inside on a 1″ x 3″ bracket. I used some trim to hide the plywood edges and slathered the whole lot in stain and polyurethane.