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.
Recently I was invited by Michel Rouzic to try his software, Photosounder, designed for converting images into sound. Image to sound conversion is something I’ve been meaning to explore, so today I finally had some time to have a look. The software does much more than create strange sound from images. It’s a great time stretching tool, and it also reads in wave files as images allowing you to use the same sort of manipulation you can do on image based files.
Hi,
You might be interested in the works done by Nicolas Fournel, who developped the same kind of applets… the interface does not look as nice, but functionality is apparently the same.
http://www.nicolasfournel.com/
I am familiar with Mr. Fournel’s work. He developed AudioPaint, which is quite similar. His software can be configured to use color values for panning to produced some interesting results.
Thank you for this post John, interesting choice of image! I particularly like the beginning of it.
As for the comparison with AudioPaint, while AudioPaint surely is a nice program, it differs from Photosounder in many ways. First of them is the synthesis technique. AudioPaint uses sine synthesis, and, while it makes nice crystal clear sounds on a few chosen very dark images, you don’t want to use that to synthesise your vacation photos. Photosounder uses noise synthesis because it’s a better general purpose technique.
Also an often overlooked aspect of Photosounder is that it also opens audio, and as such is also an audio editor of sorts.
We should maybe pay tribute to MetaSynth, one of the first graphical spectral synthesis software packages.
http://www.uisoftware.com/MetaSynth/
Thank you, Michael. I certainly will be doing some more sound design with Photosounder. It’s an impressive tool. I love what it does with wave files as well and will be posting an example soon.
MetaSynth looks pretty amazing, Jean-François. I’ll probably get the demo and tease myself a bit when I have the time. For further exploration there’s an article that describes eight apps that convert imagery to sound (excluding Photosounder which might not have released yet) called Say it With Pictures on emusician.com.
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This is the absolute coolest doodad I have ever seen. Please, take a bow. Hats off to the crew who put this together, it really is incredible. Thanks, this will be fun to play with.
What settings did you use to get this sound? My pics yield crackly sounds…
Well it was 13 years ago so I don’t remember exactly, but it might have to do, in part, with the contrast in the photo. Maybe try some photos that have diagonals that differ significantly from each other?