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Windows 95 Startup Sounds Transformed Into Amazing Ambient Music

Microsoft celebrated the 20th anniversary of the release of Windows 95. But the best part of all of this may be this oddly eerie, beautiful set of ambient tunes, slowing down the best-known Windows branding by 4000%.

win95 launch

This is what Brian Eno sounds like when you Brian Eno-ify Brian Eno.

While we’re at it, it’s worth revisiting some of the startup sounds over the years.

Brian Eno is best known for his contribution to Windows 95. To my mind, it’s the best of the startup sounds. Eno described the brief as “inspiring, universal, blah- blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental [and] emotional” — and gave Microsoft twice the length they asked for, true to form. Not 4000%, only 200%.

Tom Ozanich and Bill Brown composed Windows XP and the associated sounds (with Emmy winner Ozanich working on orchestral samples. Brown is the composer behind CSI:NY and Any Given Sunday with a long game resume including Wolfenstein.

The legendary Robert Fripp famously contributed to the infamous Windows Vista for a cheery tune for that OS that has stuck with subsequent releases, working alongside Tucker Martine and Steve Ball of Microsoft.

Other sounds were developed in-house. My experience of the audio team at Microsoft over the years with my brief contacts with them has been that they’re musicians like us – and often know their way around a Mac, too. (Apple machines do show up in Microsoft’s offices now and then.)

I certainly want to wish a very happy birthday to Windows, or, erm, to Windows95. (Hey, I used Windows 3.x, too – and made some music on it!)

I never get tired of computers. For all the bitching and moaning – what wondrous machines we have on our desks, that allow us to make sounds we’ve never before imagined, and meet people who love what we love from the other side of the world. (Where’s Louis C.K. when you need him?)

Here’s a wonderful compilation of still more Windows sounds… Ah, the magic of time. All those years of things breaking just fade nicely into nostalgia.

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PETER KIRN is a composer, media artist/VJ, and writer, and the creator and editor of Create Digital Music. He’s the author of Real World Digital Audio from Peachpit Press, a comprehensive book on producing music with computers and digital technology. His own music and digital media art has been presented in the U.S., Korea, Canada, France, and Bulgaria. He is a frequent collaborator with dance and other media, including working with choreographer Christopher Williams on the Bessie Award-winning Ursula and the 11,000 Virgins. He also writes for Macworld, Make, Keyboard, and Computer Music magazines.
This article originally appeared here. Republished under creative commons license.

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