The Windows 98 startup sound was an evolution of the Windows 95 sound, with a more orchestral feel. As the first version of Windows to introduce the Start button and taskbar, this startup sound is often regarded as a classic.

The six-second jingle brings to mind the excitement and anticipation of exploring a new frontier in personal computing. The Windows 95 startup sound was composed by Brian Eno, a legendary ambient music composer. The evolution of Windows startup sounds.A brief History of startup sounds in Windows.How to change the default startup sound in Windows 11 or 10.This article originally appeared on The Industry Observer, which is now part of The Music Network. The most wonderful thing about this sound - other than the fact it has been heard billions of times around the world, most of whom aren’t aware of the tune’s storied composer - is that if you slow it down by 2300%, it sounds a hell of a lot like a Brian Eno song. It’s like catching Mario playing a Sega Mega Drive. Ironically, Eno used a Mac to create the piece, admitting to BBC Radio 4 in 2009 that “I’ve never used a PC in my life I don’t like them.” 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.” “I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. “I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music”, he continued. It’s like making a tiny little jewel.”Įno soon became obsessed by this task, creating 84 different pieces of music – the other 83 of which I’d love to see the light of day at some point. “I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. “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 3.25 seconds long.’ And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, Here’s a specific problem - solve it.’ I’d been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. “The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. What a showboat!Įno explained how this particular job come about in an interview with SF Gate. If you’re familiar with Eno’s stretched-out ambient epics, it should come as little surprise that he ended up with a piece close to double the intended length. They gave him a long string of adjectives that the sound needed to capture – quite a task considering the original brief was for a piece that only lasted 3.25 seconds. Surprisingly, it was made by the king of ambient music, Brian Eno, who was tapped by Microsoft’s executives to create this piece of music. Good, hey? Once you listen to it as a composition, it sounds rather complicated.

Windows xp startup sound