Miscellany: More Projects
GladesBox
GladesBox was a project I worked on with Colby Leider and Doug Mann at the University of Miami in 2011. The goal was to create a soundscape recording device with the following criteria:
- It could record up to one year of continuous, high-quality audio.
- It could withstand harsh environments for long periods of time. Since we are in South Florida, the “harsh environment” was the Everglades.
- It could stream compressed audio to the Internet.
- It would be self-sufficient, requiring little or no maintenance once deployed.
- It would also gather environmental data that could synchronized with the audio.
The project was successful in some ways, less successful in other ways, but it was a ton of fun to work on! Here is a Prezi that provides a bit more information about the project.
Unbound Ensemble
Unbound was an improvisational group that was active for a couple of years. We had a very interesting mix of excellent performers with different backgrounds. Please visit the Unbound website for more info and a video.
Florida Coastal Everglades LTER
I developed a web application for the Florida Coastal Everglades Long Term Ecological Research project centered at FIU. The project hosts a large number of interesting data sets that cover various environmental quality metrics recorded over long periods of time. For some time, the data sets have been available for download as comma-delimited text files, but there was no way to visualize the data without importing the file into Excel or something similar. So, they asked me to develop a tool that would provide timeline graphs of the datasets. We imported the datasets into a relational database, and then used Highcharts (a JavaScript plugin) to display the data. Here is one example of climate data from 1951 to the present. And here is a page with a number of datasets. (On that page, click on the graph icon to see a graph.)
The tool also included an administrative section that allowed their information managers to configure the presentation of each dataset.
Music Font
Dissatisfied with available music notation fonts, a few years ago I developed my own typeface called Zuleta Music for use with Finale music notation software. The goal of the typeface was to create glyphs with more personality than found in the Engraver and Maestro fonts but without the excesses of the Jazz font. (Those were the three included with Finale at the time.) Inspired by the amazing hand-notated scores of 20th-century composers like Ligeti and Crumb, I wanted to create a personal look for my scores without giving up the convenience of music notation software.
Unfortunately, the font no longer works with recent versions of Finale and I have not had the time (or energy?) to fix this problem. Maybe some day I will make it available online, along with examples and a more detailed discussion of the design goals. In the meantime, please view any of the scores on my Compositions page for examples in context. The characteristics of the typeface are especially noticeable in the clefs, rests, dynamic markings, and some symbols like the fermata. It obviously doesn’t come close to Crumb or Ligeti, but it does give the scores a subtle distinction I think.
Other Projects
- WeeJazz.com: Older website I did several years back for my friend and former bass teacher Eddie Edwards.