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.
To create this sound I took the bubbles sound from yesterday and programmed it into a simple sampling VST. I built a pattern of chords in a MIDI clip that covered a wide range of frequencies for the sample simultaneously. This created a sort of spectrum of pitches. The next step was to spread that spectrum of pitches by resampling the output in a processor called Fragulator that effectively chops up the sample into fragments that can then be automatically looped at different frequencies.
Interesting processing technique, the resulting sounds are amazing.
Btw… this reminds me to early childhood days, when I watched my father washing his car in our backyard. As he hosed down the chassis, one could hear alot of metal resonance, almost like the car was telling, kinda “Yeah, more to the shoulder” or “Be careful in the rims, I’m ticklish!”
Thanks for this flashback ;o)
I’m glad you didn’t include “smell-o-rama” on this one!