“We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,” Eno cites the engineers as saying, adding that one of the last things they mentioned was the sound had to be just 3 seconds long. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, ‘Here's a specific problem – solve it,’” he said in a 1996 interview.Įno explains that Microsoft designers Mark Malamud and Erik Gavriluk had very specific requirements for the Windows 95 sound. “I'd been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. Eno recalls that Microsoft’s request to create a startup sound for Windows came just at the right time because he was “completely bereft of ideas.”
