Ah, the many eras of corporate music. Canyon.mid exemplifies the late 80s / early 90s aesthetic - gets me fired up to optimize my multimedia strategy.
The current era is mostly inspiring 4 chord repetitions with muted guitar and piano, with B-roll of cinematic nature footage and racially diverse businesspeople shaking hands. Also jaunty ukulele riffs with dance claps and some kind of "oh oh ayy-oh" vocal hook.
What creative bounties will the coming decades bring?
In answer to your closing rhetorical, I'd like the throw a curveball: Corporate Businesswave, the genre of truly creative artists riffing on soulless corporate jingle culture. Plenty of 80s/90s aesthetic to go around here. I personally love "Money Can Buy Happiness" and "Mark to Market" by New Century, "Pump and Dump" by Shadow and Mirrors, and "Insider Trading" by Michael Weber.
Thanks for sharing, favorite so far is also "Money Can Buy Happiness".
The song would be perfectly at home in the GTA Vice City soundtrack including lyrics like:
"More is more and less is less, money can buy happiness"
"Life can be so effortless, money can buy happiness"
Probably the most famous example of this genre is James Ferraro's "Far Side Virtual", which can be listened to in its entirety here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pd-uSm8ittU
I work in finance, so this playlist has been highly entertaining, thanks. Especially when one of my trader colleagues pops up on voice chat to unwittingly duet with Gordon Gekko.
The infinite four chord inspiration sound is quite dreadful (shame on you, Hans Zimmer), but I do hope we never revert to the times of KPMG, we're strong as can be: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCvKXgp-Awo. If you haven't heard it, first prepare some ear bleach before you click.
Isn’t the ukulele thing straight from Israel Kamakawiwo`ole’s take on “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”, or a bleak imitation thereof?
I want my 60s-70s orchestral muzak back. Complete with grainy 24fps footage of sunny cities with enormous futuristic-looking business centers and viaducts, successful-looking smiling people riding those ginormous cars to work. Keith Mansfield, David Lindup, Alan Hawkshaw. Big names of library music.
The synthwave era in comparison sounds somewhat decadent. But I like it too.
For anyone interested in this genre, there is a very large collection of 60s/70s library music available on Spotify. Searching for "KPM 1000" will get you started.
I feel like there was at least one additional generation of corporate muzak between these two movements, but I am slightly too young to really put words to it. I remember bank and tech commercials being full of xylophones and marimbas around the turn of the century. Think the soundtrack to American Beauty. James Ferraro's Far Side Virtual definitely touches upon it too.
Somehow, this made me think of Amtrak when they used a jazz song from the Pat Metheny Group as their radio jingle. That advertisement felt surprising to me at the time, and stimulated oddly nostalgic day dreams about sophisticated train trips that I never actually experienced...
There was an easter egg in Windows 95 for clouds.mid.[1] You had to create a folder and rename it a few times, and then it would play the song[2]. Even hearing it now takes me back to a simpler time...
It wrapped media objects into compatible OLE 1.0 objects for insertion into OLE containers (example: office documents, presentations etc). It was a component of OLE before later versions and before OLE became ActiveX, and learned to embed stuff by themselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding#O...
It's weird to think how big a part of desktop computing this once was, and now there's no real expectation for it. Web content's also not particularly embeddable. I used to love KParts in KDE - I'd start the morning with Konqueror open with some tabs showing web pages, some tabs showing my Excel time sheet or the Word docs with specs for what I was working on, and it was just totally normal that all this stuff worked and composed together.
IIRC - fuzzy old memories, but I think you could use it with OLE to combine a few different embedded OLE sources into one document, e.g. a Microsoft Draw vector piece and a Media Player MID into one component that could be embedded elsewhere.
Very useless. Most Win 3.1 machines with 1-4MB RAM could barely even start MS Draw without churning swap like they were trying to make butter....
I did. It wasn't very cool after all. I know what you mean about the icon, too. And why wasn't it easier to get that kind of cool custom icon for one's favorite, and still current, MS-DOS apps at that time? Frustrating.
Man. I remember making little mids on a flip phone in the 2000s. When you're playing with the silly toots and beeps you imagine them so much bigger. These covers are how it sounds in your head when you're writing one.
Love it. virt also did a little tune called "here's your seven day forecast" that's also from that era and really nice, like a stereotypical weather channel tune.
Didn't even have to click through it to predict that it'd be Jake Kaufman's take on it - although he's now known for Shantae and Shovel Knight among other things :)
The irony is, Windows was developed on Tandy hardware. Because it had more CPU and graphics oomph than any IBM offering up through the AT, Microsoft developed Windows 1.0 on the Tandy 2000 and shipped it with drivers for the PC. A driver disk for the 2000 itself was available.
I've sung or hummed along to canyon.mid a time or two. We're good. The meaning of the word 'song' has expanded in popular usage. I play the horn (french horn) and I smile an nod when someone calls a clarinet a horn.
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The current era is mostly inspiring 4 chord repetitions with muted guitar and piano, with B-roll of cinematic nature footage and racially diverse businesspeople shaking hands. Also jaunty ukulele riffs with dance claps and some kind of "oh oh ayy-oh" vocal hook.
What creative bounties will the coming decades bring?
A good jumping-off point: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/39pqsBTsb9UNYv1dXbZpff?si=...
The song would be perfectly at home in the GTA Vice City soundtrack including lyrics like: "More is more and less is less, money can buy happiness" "Life can be so effortless, money can buy happiness"
Medley of a bunch of pop songs on the premise they all use the same 4 chords.
https://youtu.be/5pidokakU4I
I want my 60s-70s orchestral muzak back. Complete with grainy 24fps footage of sunny cities with enormous futuristic-looking business centers and viaducts, successful-looking smiling people riding those ginormous cars to work. Keith Mansfield, David Lindup, Alan Hawkshaw. Big names of library music.
The synthwave era in comparison sounds somewhat decadent. But I like it too.
There is also a documentary on the subject:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Library-Music-Film-Shawn-Lee/dp/B08...
[0]: https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/multimedia/everonward_trans....
https://youtu.be/q26aQKRjebI
[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/69883/musical-easter-egg... [2] https://soundcloud.com/brianorr/clouds
Most likely back then there were absolutely no code reviews...
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I definitely don’t won’t this kind of “features” in software I use.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV9BtuPpW9w
I first heard that in an english-course CD-rom and always thought it belonged to that course and was thus lost forever!
Thank you for letting me re-discover this thing!!!
Another one I remember well that apparently was more obscure than I realized is ISLAND.MID. It's the last one in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ome3vfadYvs&t=586s
Did anyone ever use it for its mysterious but intended purpose?
Very useless. Most Win 3.1 machines with 1-4MB RAM could barely even start MS Draw without churning swap like they were trying to make butter....
https://youtu.be/s_XYWwCu8vM
Original photo is from here, which has Windows 3.1 running: http://www.oldskool.org/guides/tvdog/RLRLX.html
Song? It’s just music there’s no singing in it. Midi is an instrumental only declarative format.
There's nothing stopping you from using midi data to generate singing: https://youtu.be/Ab4zUFKxVpk?t=87
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