Thursday, 30 July 2020

Listen to one hour of very familiar and relaxing hold music

"Just put it in the background and chill, or try to hypnotize yourself with the Cisco logo," says uploader ricksslickpicks.

Once you're suitably relaxed, you might listen to the classic episode from This American Life about one man's obsession with this song, titled "Opus No. 1," and its origins.

Tim Carleton and Darrick Deel composed the piece in 1989 when they were around 16 years old. It is the quintessential example of holdwave music. And yes, that is apparently an actual vaporwave-adjacent genre. From an archived Cisco blog post:

Darrick and Tim’s story actually begins back in 1989, when as teenagers and friends they recorded a song in their garage. Unfortunately, they didn’t go on to rockstar fame and fortune, but years later Darrick would go on to take a job with Cisco. In his role building Cisco’s first version of IP phones, he was aware of Cisco’s need for a piece of music to use as the default hold music for the new system. Cut to several years later, and their high school composition has become the hold music for the world’s most popular phone systems with over 65 million IP phones sold. With that, Opus No. 1 has left the safety of Darrick and Tim’s childhood recording studio and entered earworm status.