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.
Today during my audio production class I was demonstrating to my students how time correction impacts digital audio when pitch shifting more than a few semitones. To illustrate this I pitched down a chunk of music an octave with the time correction on in Pro Tools. The degradation was clear, but it occurred to me that it would be even more obvious if I shifted it back up to the original pitch with time correction enabled again.
I’ve found for maximum artefacts you should pitch up (with the time correction on) and then pitch it back down. I think you lose more that way.
Sounds good, Matt. I’ll give that a try. I think the interesting thing about going down is that the time correction algorithm has to remove data, therefore effectively down-sampling. Going up first might be interesting because the algorithm has to inject data into the clip to achieve the time correction. There’s lots more to explore here.
Hi,
I actually wrote the elastic audio feature in ProTools and I’m curious about which algorithm you were using. I’m thinking it must have been the Polyfonic one.
Anyway, yes there are lots of interesting artifacts that can be had from over stretching. Try ripping vocals apart with the monophonic alg. Especially just in the decay of a word – it gives a nice weird glittery effect.
Have fun!
S
@Stephen That’s really interesting. I’m not sure which algorithm it was. I had “Time Correction” checked while pitch shifting under the Audio Suite menu in Pro Tools LE 7.4.2 if that’s any indication. Cheers!
Ah, OK I thought you were using real time elastic audio with PT8’s region based pitch shift feature.
I wasn’t, but it sounds like I’ll have to give that a go once we’ve upgraded. Cheers!