[h-w]

I always love Eno’s description of the spec for this job:

“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.’”

[anyfactor]

I personally feel that the word that most accurately describe the windows 95,98 and XP startup sounds is "cathartic". Specially the slowed down versions.

The closest way to describe my experience of hearing these startup music is like Tom Haverford from parks and rec saying,"A piece of art caused me to have an emotional reaction. Is that normal?"

[aasasd]

By ‘slowed down’, do you mean this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnoX3E2WFcc ?

[01acheru]

Sounds like the background music of early SimCity games, at least 3000 had something like this, thanks for sharing!

[aasasd]

In case you're unfamiliar: it's a whole microgenre. However idk what to call it: afaik the more popular slowdown values are 400% and 800%, so ‘slowed down’ together with these can be used as keywords for searching.

E.g. https://youtube.com/watch?v=BFyeuLhjcPY

Slowing down music that was already downtempo gonna result in that ultra-ambient: https://youtube.com/watch?v=b3i06yw4A4E

‘PaulStretch’ software is often used for this, and its algo gives that ethereal quality.

[SeanLuke]

Wait, he made 84 startup sounds? Are the others available?

[ffhhj]

One for each version 'till 95 ;)