Windows 95 – 20 years ago, featuring Brian Eno
Start up sound REMASTERED for the 21st Century!
In a 1996 interview, Eno explained the origin of The Microsoft Sound:
The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I’d been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, “Here’s a specific problem — solve it.”
The thing from the agency said, “We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,” this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said “and it must be 3 1/4 seconds long.”
I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel.
In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work.
Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.
Eno actually also created the iconic sound on a Mac. In a 2009 interview, Eno admitted “I wrote it on a Mac, I’ve never used a PC in my life; I don’t like them.”