A member of The Cleveland Orchestra and head of the double bass department at Cleveland Institute of Music, Scott Dixon has been creating a new system for musical intonation. Called Rational Tonality, this system addresses the problem of just intonation in the context of modern orchestras and ensembles.
The Rational Tonality app is a tool that allows a player to explore and practice with tones in these rational relationships.
In 2020, Charlie Hunter asked me:
The result was Wheelhouse Beats, released in September 2022. Wheelhouse plays a meticulously edited and sequenced set of grooves by Bobby Previte, Carter McLean, George Sluppick, Corey Fonville, Derrek Phillips, Bean, Brevan Hampden, Chris Gelb, with more drummers to come.
Wheelhouse is a subscription service and runs on Android, iOS, and macOS. To keep playback efficient, it uses a custom audio engine written in C.
Created for the Ottawa Jazz Festival, this app is a directory and schedule to one of Canada‘s premier events. After several online events held during the pandemic, the in-person festival returned in 2022 with more than 100 concerts.
The app includes a back-end database, management interface, real-time updates, and push notifications, all part of the Gazebo group of apps.
The prototype and initial implementation for Gazebo, this app provided the schedule and map for Greensboro Bound in 2019 and 2022.
Held in Greensboro, North Carolina, Greensboro Bound is a literary festival that has hosted hundreds of authors and thousands of book lovers.
Walking Venezia was commissioned by ensemBle baBel and made possible by a grant from the Pro-Helvetia Close Distance program.
As a group that plays improvised music, ensemble baBel was looking for a way to present recorded music. Rather than a traditional app or game, Walking Venezia is an art piece that interacts with a listener‘s choices and environment.
Erika Boysen is an innovator in flute performance, and wanted an innovative medium to present new works she commissioned for a singing, speaking, and moving flutist.
Moving Sound is an app that combines Erika‘s performances with the score, interviews, and background information on each composition.
Released in 2020, Audio Deck is an app to share audio files.
Living somewhere between iTunes and Dropbox, Audio Deck is used by producers and audio engineers to deliver mixes and used by musicians to collaborate.
Audio Deck is slated for a v2 in 2023, adding a web interface to the native app.
In 2021, I worked at Virtual Chair, which helped large academic conferences produce their events online.
I created a back-end system and dashboard for us to manage these virtual spaces and the materials presented at the conference, then tied together different API‘s to make directories, papers, videos, and live talks available according to the conference schedule.
I joined Notion Music in 2004, and from 2009 to 2019 was the primary developer and engineering manager.
I designed and wrote the UI for Notion 1. For Notion 3, I created a new system to edit, format, and render music notation and wrote an audio engine to interpret scores, play orchestral samples, and accompany live theater.
In 2013, Notion Music was purchased by PreSonus, leading to the score editor now included in Studio One. In 2014, the mobile version of Notion was featured in Apple’s “Your Verse” national ad campaign.