About Robert Fuller

I'm the visionary, webmaster, editor, and chief polymath behind The Fuller Zone. While my educational background is all in music (B.M. in Piano Performance, Peabody Conservatory; M.A. in Piano Performance, University of California, Santa Barbara; and Ph.D. in Music Composition, University of Iowa), I have always enjoyed a diverse variety of interests, mostly relating to the creative arts and sciences.

My late parents Brian and Tuulia were both instrumental in encouraging myself and my four brothers (I'm the middle of five boys) to take part in and excel in many different pursuits, and to be serious about our education. My mother was fluent in about six languages, and when we were growing up, she would always be dropping by the local thrift stores (she called them lumppukaupat, Finnish for “junk shops”) to buy lots of books at around 25 or 50 cents apiece; my dad would always ask her jokingly why she didn't wait until they were on sale.

We grew up in a small town in upstate New York 30 miles east of Albany, in what was originally a duplex; after my parents took over the whole house, the two halves were joined by archways on each floor, and, for much of one of the upstairs hallways and one of the rooms downstairs, they tore out the plaster, leaving the wall struts and the horizontal slats in the wall, which made for perfectly-sized bookcases. So our house was just filled with books of all descriptions. I suppose, then, that my love of language and reading came largely from my mother, although both of my parents were intellectually curious about all sorts of things.

My dad was more the tinkerer, the one who mastered electronics sufficiently to always be fixing TVs for the neighbors; there were always picture tubes and all kinds of miscellaneous electronic components strewn about the two rooms of his shop where he did the repairs. And when home computers came into the picture around the late 70s, he of course developed an interest in those, as well. And, from my perspective, his love of music, especially classical and jazz (and later on, gospel music), was a big part of why my life unfolded as it did.

Another key influence in my childhood years was my late Uncle Ramon, who taught Music Theory and Composition at SUNY Buffalo. We would have visits across the state, usually alternating east and west directions every summer or so. Around the summer when I was nine, Ramon, in a single performance from memory on our modest upright piano, changed the course of my life pretty profoundly. He played Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata, and boy was I hooked! I had already been teaching myself piano along with my eldest brother and a friend of his, but after hearing my Uncle Ramon perform so beautifully, I guess that got me even more motivated to learn piano. So it was probably the summer I turned ten that I visited the Buffalo Fullers, and played for Ramon, who I'm sure wanted to hear the progress I'd been making. In addition to listening to me play, he also introduced me for what I'm sure was the very first time to the magical and weird world of electronic music. There was a concert, at the University, of electronic music, and probably music composed for acoustic instruments as well, and I'm sure at the time I didn't know quite what to make of it. So I probably filed it away as one of those experiences and didn't think much more of it at the time. But kids can tend to be pretty open to new experiences, and, as you'll see in a bit, eventually that experience proved to be one that had greater significance to me than I had imagined at the time.

Ramon also did something that was to become one of the most profound things that shaped my early life, and onward into adulthood: He recommended to my parents that they get me piano lessons, which they so graciously did.

I began lessons with a local teacher, Caroline Hogue, who lived near what was then the elementary school, and after two years, I ended up auditioning at The Arts Center of the Holy Names Campus in Albany. One of my audition pieces was Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata! I think I heard from my parents that the people I played for thought that my performance was a bit rough around the edges, but that they could see potential in me, so I was admitted into the school. I took piano lessons from Carole Friedman, first at the school, and later, as private lessons at her residence.

After five years of lessons with her, I auditioned at Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore, and was accepted for studies with Walter Hautzig, who was especially good at music of the Classical and Romantic eras, particularly music in the Viennese tradition. I was also fortunate to be able to participate in a master class with Leon Fleisher.

I continued my studies in Piano Performance the next year at UCSB with Betty Oberacker. That’s where I first became introduced to the world of Computer Music, including a visit by guest composer Iannis Xenakis. After graduating with my Masters Degree, in the late 80s, I was rehearsal pianist and pit orchestra pianist for a musical theatre company, Santa Barbara Civic Light Opera. And in 1989, just a year before heading partway back east, I went to a performance at the Ojai Festival (near Ventura), where I met one of the major influences on my work in music composition (and also free improvisation), the French Catholic mystic composer Olivier Messiaen, and his wife, the pianist Yvonne Loriod, who was performing ten movements from the Vingt Regards sur l’Enfant Jésus.

In 1990, I began my Ph.D. studies in Music Composition at University of Iowa with Kenneth Gaburo and Robert Paredes. During my studies there, my early experience hearing the electronic music that my uncle had introduced me to became quite a central focus. My degree work was largely focused on Computer and Electronic Music, most of it centered around what was then referred to as the Experimental Music Studios. While there was certainly an intensive focus on studies directly related to music, both of my teachers at Iowa were keen on keeping the study of music anchored within a larger framework, and not simply as some kind of separate discipline.

The long and short of it was that they were truly immersed in, and passionate about, many other studies that related directly to language, especially as regards critical thinking, and they also emphasized the inherently political nature of virtually all human activities.

While I was engaged in my creative work in Electronic and Computer Music at the Experimental Music Studios, one of the facets of that work was that I did lots of computer programming, initially mainly in Turbo Basic (remember, this was the early 90s), and then in DSP assembly language programming, for the Motorola DSP32C chip, which was one of those extra cards that was added to the PC. (Back in those days, the 286 or 386 computers were not fast enough to compute WAV files in realtime, but the DSP32C was easily able to do that. So, if you didn't want to wait around for hours for the PC to compute your audio waveforms, you became incentivized to learn DSP assembly language programming.)

Ultimately this kind of intensive work in computer programming—about a couple of years after I received the Ph.D. degree (in 1993)—ended up leading to the next phase of my life, as a consultant (or employee) in various Silicon Valley companies, beginning in August 1995.

I started out, thanks to my brother Eirik, who vouched for and mentored me, as a sysadmin at a digital mapping company (Etak, later known as TeleAtlas), and within eight months, when the Informix Database Administrator left the company, was hired on in that capacity. I was there for four years, and for the last year or so, in 1999, I was also working as an Informix Database consultant at Harris Farinon. The next year, it was consulting as a Data Warehouse Administrator for Providian Financial, in both San Francisco and Oakland.

Then I was hired at a startup called Space Machine, where initially the focus of the company wasn't at all clear to me, but within two years after I started, we became one of those GPS Navigation companies, and I was the sole person responsible for converting all of the digital map data from the map data providers' format into the format required by our software and hardware. Toward the end of the company's tenure in the realm of GPS Navigation, the company changed focus pretty radically, shifting over to the creation of educational apps for children, initially for the iOS, and then for Android. I became the Android guy, so that's when I started learning about Android development.

Since about 2011 or 2012, I've still been focused on creating Android apps, primarily in the arena of visual design, but I've also been doing lots of writing, including poetry, fiction, prose poetry, and essays. And there's also the cooking and baking... And I've done plenty of photography, work in film, and also... Yeah: piano, composition, improvisation, and electronic and computer music.

What I would really like to be able to do, among other things, is to be able to offer my visual designs apps for free, and ad-free, for kids of all ages. Shape Shifter in particular is a powerful tool for exploring mathematically-generated shapes of many different varieties, and it would be wonderful to see what kinds of images kids could create with it. I've also talked to someone who works with special needs students, and when she saw Shape Shifter, she agreed that it could be quite a powerful tool to get kids like that engaged in creating something interesting.

The other facet of Shape Shifter that could readily be added to the app is a way for people to directly explore the underlying mathematics (polar equations, mainly) that allows these shapes to be created by changing certain numeric parameters. And, in conjunction with the mathematics, a bit of programming, as well, in the form of (usually rather small) snippets of code that operate directly on the GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) of the device or computer.

In order for me to be able to offer any of my three visual design apps for free, and ad-free, that would require a crowdfunding campaign such as Patreon, as well as plenty of people wishing to subscribe to the campaign so as to help support and propagate my creative work, including these apps, my writing and music, and so forth.

So that's my story thus far, in a nutshell. You're welcome to become a part of it, whether as a Guest Contributor to this site, a patron (once I get a crowdfunding campaign going), an enthusiastic follower of this site, or all of the above.