its U.S. release delayed until 1982 because of a shakeup in the management of 20th Century Fox. Byrd also wrote commercially for advertising and television, including a theme for the CBS Evening News, developed sounds used in Mattel toys, and created the electronic/modified voice sound effects for the drones in Douglas Trumbull's Silent Running (which may have been the inspiration for the "voice" of R2-D2 in the first Star Wars film). Later work In 1986, Byrd moved to northern California, where he formed a klezmer group, the Jewish Wedding Band, later renamed Catskills Revival. He researched the history of Jewish music in America, locating and performing forgotten pieces from stage shows and films. The band released two albums, Songs of Love and Chutzpah (1997), and A Child's Hanukkah (1998). In the 1990s, he also launched LogoMusic, developing musical signatures and other sound material for corporate websites. In 2006 Byrd collaborated with the Norwegian improvisation group Spunk and UK sound art unit Dreams of Tall Buildings. For White Elephant, a collaboration between these three parties, he created a graphic score as "a kind of 'space opera' - in the form of an imaginary space mission outside our galaxy in the year 9050. Photographs from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope are the basis for the score, consisting of a mixture of listed, sampled and improvised sounds in parallel to an electronic soundtrack created by Dreams of Tall Buildings." White Elephant was premiered at Sonic Arts Network's Expo festival in Manchester, England on 24 June 2006. Byrd presently lives in northern California, where he has taught music history and theory at the College of the Redwoods in Eureka since 2000. He was for five years a food columnist for the North Coast Journal in Humboldt County, California. References External links 1937 births Living people University of Arizona alumni American electronic musicians American film score composers American male film score composers 20th-century American keyboardists American communists American male organists Songwriters from Kentucky American television composers Experimental composers Fluxus Musicians from Louisville, Kentucky 20th-century American composers 21st-century organists 20th-century American male musicians 21st-century American male musicians American male songwriters American organists