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.
I created this track using Tiction (recently featured on CDM), an interesting piece of MIDI sequencing software created by Hans Kuder and developed in Processing. Tiction works by connecting nodes together to form loops. Each node has properties that can be adjusted like the number of “tics”. Dragging the nodes around the screen changes the pitch and volume of the nodes. I routed the MIDI output from Tiction into MDA’s DX10 while dragging and adjusting the nodes on the screen. After capturing the output I processed it through Pluggo’s Comber and a little bit of reverb. Here I have rendered the first fifty seconds as an excerpt for today’s sound.
You did this on a Mac right? I couldn’t get Tiction to send midi at all on a PC…
Hi Chaircrusher. It was really a piece of cake on OSX. One thing I saw that Hans Kuder suggested to help get it working in windows was to install the processing.org package.
http://www.tinkthank.net/software/tiction/#comment-14
Pingback: Audio Cookbook » Blog Archive » Sequence of Randomized Pitches and Durations