Category Archives: Thoughts

Short observations and musings about the world

An Ode to Two Binary Dates

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Here is a fun bit of semi-nonsense that I composed almost three years ago to celebrate the occurrence of the twin “binary dates” on Nov. 10, ’11 and Nov. 11, ’11.  They were the final binary dates of this century.

Ode to 111011 and 111111

O 111011 and 111111!
We sing to thee,
a dyad of diurnal bits
twined in twain,
‘tween which none are ‘twixt!

O dual days, divotive two,
divergent bi-ways of boolean biphilia,
dare we not and nor or nand!
Direct our trilling duet
t’wards thy twin twilit lands.

Doubt naught even dubious ones;
distrust no duplexed dichotomy.
There’s no discord in duplicity!
Four your double pairing is no dilemma,
but a divulging of parallel parity.

Transforming winter landscapes

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It feels like winter is approaching again here in the Northeast United States.  And I was very happy to hear recently from Sergio Lopez-Pineiro about a wintery project he has completed with co-designer Nicole Halstead.  Olmsted’s Blank Snow was an effort to change the snow-plowing practices in Buffalo, New York’s public park spaces to transform their winter landscapes in creative and thought-provoking ways.  The project included making a short video to document the experiment and Sergio wrote to let me know that he has included my composition “1” from the Ambient Nouveau series as the soundtrack to the video.  You can check out the project description and movie with these links

Olmsted’s Blank Snow project

Olmsted’s Blank Snow, the Movie

My thanks to Sergio and I hope others will make further creative uses of my music.

 

Films and videos that use my music

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I was somewhat surprised to learn about a month ago that my music has been used in a number of films and videos.  I stumbled upon the profile of an Anthony Kozar on IMDb, the Internet Movie Database, and was shocked that the profile actually seemed to belong to me!  You can see from the soundtrack details that two of my ambient pieces, Whales and Dorian Gray, were used in the 2011 film Alien Inhabitant. And a brief excerpt of my composition “3” from the Ambient Nouveau series was included in the short documentary film On Mont Blanc with Don Planner.

This made me curious as I had discovered several months ago that the video The Ultimate Guide To Royalty-Free Music For Youtube! had mentioned my music and web site.  A quick search on YouTube for my name found more than half a dozen videos that are using my music!  Some of my favorite uses are in London sunset time lapse, Last Person in This Place (a short story), and Mandalas and Jung.  The last of these actually layers my composition Whales with a chant by Hildegard von Bingen and some other sounds for a very trippy mash-up.

I am very pleased that people have enjoyed my music enough to include it in their creations.  And I want to thank Indy Mogul for including me in their guide to royalty-free music.  I suspect that I especially need to thank Kevin MacLeod, creator of the site incompetech.com which features tons of his music plus some really nifty graph & grid paper generators.  I emailed Kevin a few years ago to thank him for his site and he ended up linking to my music in his FAQ.  I am pretty sure that it was this small kindness that has led to my music receiving much of the attention that it has over the years.  So, thanks Kevin!