portrait of this blog's author - by Stephen Blackman 2008

Thursday, November 30, 2017

Brian Eno - Windows 95 Startup Sound





From the wonderful Austin Kleon
and Mental Floss

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 3.25 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. 

In case you wonder (like I did!) this is the music of Brian's start sound for Window 95 slowed down 23 times.
The video is a commercial for Windows 95 played at .23x speed.

So what's the next step? Treat it as any other piece of music obviously! Genius move from pianist Marcin Dobrowski


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