New Spectral Tablature Collaborations Exhibited in Tokyo

Posted on March 30, 2015 by John C.S. Keston

I am pleased to be participating in an exhibition of work by Jasio Stefanski at Print Gallery in Tokyo, Japan. Jasio is showing a variety of his work including two pieces that we collaborated on together fron the series Spectral Tablature. The first piece is Synthetic Skyline previously exhibited for the Audible Edge sound art exhibition at the Katherine Nash Gallery in Minneapolis. The second piece is a new work in the series titled Synthetic Transitions.

To create the work I started by composing a simple sequence of notes that speed up and then slow down. Jasio requested that we included diagonal lines in the piece so I used linear portamento on the Moog Sub 37 to create the “transitions” he was interested in seeing. The video shows the plotter rendering Jasio’s Reprise of the work shown/heard in the image/audio below.

Jasio’s Reprise is based on form and color values as opposed to acoustic accuracy. The visuals were composed to place emphasis on the “transitions” or portamento. The output visually reinterprets the angles informed by the gliding notes without connecting them in the composition. When sonified the plotted design singles out the portamento, isolating it from the context of the sustained frequencies.

New Spectral Tablature Collaboration

Posted on February 25, 2015 by John C.S. Keston

Part music, part visual art, and part sound design, the collaborative series Spectral Tablature is something I’ve been doing in various forms since 2013. Recently I have been working on a new piece in collaboration with Jasio Stefanski for an upcoming exhibition of his work. I’ll share more information about the exhibit in a future post. For now I’d like to present some of the content that I generated in the process of working on the project.

The image above is spectral analysis of a piece of music that I composed deliberately to produce interesting sonic and visual forms. The piece includes three layers of sequences that slowly speed up and vary in pitch and then slow down again. The speed of the sequence was based on an LFO with a variable rate rather than BPM. This process, along with other techniques, resulted in a form that starts simple, approaches entropy, and then returns to its original simplicity.

The final piece will be reprocessed visually through a set of design criteria determined by Jasio. Once the new design has been printed I will digitize the image and reprocess it as sound. The new audio will retain the original frequencies and temporal information but the textural and timbral qualities will be completely transformed.

Spectral Tablature (2013)

Posted on May 13, 2013 by John C.S. Keston

Spectral Tablature is a series of collaborative installations that explore sound generated through visual processes. Sound is recorded or synthesized using common techniques then converted into images called spectral analysis. These forms are re-interpreted as a visual artifact then converted back into sound. For each pair, or “duet,” the similarities and differences in tone and texture can be heard as well as seen in the work. This series, along with two more of my installations, is currently on display for my thesis exhibition at the Northrup King Building in Minneapolis. Please read on for images and descriptions of each pair of prints along with the audio.
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Eyeo: Using Digital Imagery to Generate Sound

Posted on February 27, 2012 by John C.S. Keston

The first ever Eyeo Festival was last June and the second iteration looks to be just as amazing as the last. Here’s a video of a presentation that I gave at Eyeo last year on using digital imagery to generate sound. I also have the HTML5 slideshow available (use the left and right arrow keys to navigate). A big thanks goes out to Dave Schroeder for creating Eyeo and sharing these videos.

Processed Noise Extracted from 1972 Dialogue

Posted on March 8, 2009 by John C.S. Keston

What you hear in this clip is all of the processed noise extracted from 1972 Social Commentary Degraded with a Halftone Pattern pasted together. I ran the lot through a short ping pong delay to give give it some stereo processing. Secondly, I decided to leave this file in its 48kHz 24bit state before rendering the MP3. This way you can tell whether or not you have the latest Flash plugin. I just played it on a computer with an older version of Flash Player 10 and got some horrible crackling in the playback, however, if I play it in QuickTime by clicking the link it sounds fine. If you get the same problem, try upgrading your Flash plugin in the browser to fix it.