Brian Eno Made the Windows 95 Startup Sound on a Mac, to a Brief That Ended "It Must Be Three and a Quarter Seconds Long"
The Library of Congress added the Windows 95 chime to the National Recording Registry in 2025. Its essay recounts the agency brief, the Mac Eno wrote it on, the 80-plus miniatures he made, and the fee he pledged to Gaza aid 30 years later.
Eno told the story to the San Francisco Chronicle’s Joel Selvin in 1996, and the registry essay by his biographer, David Sheppard, quotes 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 three and a quarter seconds long’.”
This was the composer whose 1985 album, “Thursday Afternoon,” runs one uninterrupted hour. The brief gave him a little over three seconds.
He wrote it on the competition. “I’ve never used a PC in my life; I don’t like them,” Eno told BBC Radio 4 in 2009, as the essay quotes him. The Windows 95 startup sound came out of a Mac.
Then he kept going. Sheppard writes that Eno would “eventually fashion more than 80 such sonic miniatures.” The work changed how he heard time. “I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work,” he told Selvin. “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.”
The registry’s pick suggests the sounds a generation heard thousands of times are now being treated as recordings worth keeping, not system files. The next question is which interface sound from the 2000s makes the list first, and whether anyone saved the dozens of Eno miniatures Microsoft didn’t use.
