Calling instrumental pieces "songs" does exist in real-life common usage even if it's not "technically" correct. After all, the ancestor post did just that.
A classical music lecture series I listened to [1] claimed this came about because that's what iTunes calls all tracks/pieces/songs. Seems plausible, but probably other MP3 players did the same thing too.
[1] Sorry, no link, don't remember what exactly it was.
Felix Mendelssohn wrote a collection of pieces called Songs without Words for the piano. This might suggest that the term "song" can be more nuanced than simply whether or not there are vocals.
The original German title is "Lieder ohne Worte" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songs_Without_Words), and there is AFAIK no strict requirement for lyrics to count as a "Lied" (or at least "Lied" is not connected to "singen" the way "song" is connected to "sing").
Sorry, I may have been making unfair assumptions about your intent with your comment about the definition of "song." Let's assume that you are just eager to help me understand proper usage of the term. Thank you for pointing this out. I'm aware of the distinction, but was making a choice to ignore it, because I think most people ignore it. And when I was a kid playing around with Windows 3.1 I definitely would have called it a song.
Words can expand from their original meanings, you know. Look at any music player or just everyday speech, you'll see "song" being used to refer to a discrete unit of music in the same way you could use "track" or "tune".
Maybe, but we can still protest against changes when they are silly. Nobody in French would call Debussy's Clair de Lune "une chanson", why should the English language be oversimplified? Also, good music players use the word "track", and one song (or other musical piece) can span over multiple tracks, e.g. Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother.
It's not about simplification, it's just the way language works and evolves. Like how "track" originally referred to the literal engraved track on a phonograph record, yet you claim that that's obviously the correct term for a musical piece. At one point someone argued like you do now about that word.
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.
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 like the wardrobe change between instruments. did he just get too tired to play the other 2 tracks on the same day, or did the mrs. need the honey-do list before he could get back to it, or just changed shirts to make it seem like it was so time consuming it required multiple days in the studio
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.
You just triggered a memory for me that I probably haven’t thought of in 15 years, but I recall circa 2003 sitting down with my Motorola bar phone and my electric guitar and programming it note by note (with the keypad!) to play a few seconds of Enter Sandman as my ringtone.
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 :)
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....
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.
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.
I had an Iomega Zip drive, too! So cool, but the higher capacities were too expensive and the parallel adapter didn't work everywhere. I forget if there were compatible discs, not made by Iomega, that were cheaper?
I don’t know about cheaper, but Fuji, HP and photography related companies made disks.
Completely unrelated, but the SCSI versions made them pretty much plug and play with tons of hardware. There is an old Roland sampler I have made in ‘88 that uses one, and Zip disks leave floppies completely in the dust. It’s truly night and day on every level.
The rural K-8 elementary school I attended had a lab full of Mac LCIIs up through early 2000, and chose to buy a bunch of Zip drives and use them as external dedicated storage upgrades. I don’t think I ever saw anybody use them for data transfer, just storing stuff like Mario Teaches Typing and DinoPark Tycoon. Us kids were specifically instructed to never try to eject the Zip disks.
Right after I graduated, they found the budget to upgrade to blueberry iMacs. The superintendent/principal was also the only person I ever saw using a G4 Cube in the wild; that Apple salesperson must have done a hell of a job. One of the office secretaries had one of the education-market-only beige all-in-one Power Mac G3s too.
I believe sometime in the mid-2000s, they moved on to a contract with Dell like everybody else. I guess the iPad era has seen Apple regain some education market share, but they used to absolutely dominate schools.
Yes, Iomega eventually licensed disk production to a few other companies. I know for sure that Maxell and Verbatim made them, and Wikipedia says that Toshiba, Fuji, Epson and NEC also produced some.
When they were originally released, I believe the first model was SCSI-only and cost $199. Disks were $20 each and held 100MB. Eventually the price of disks dropped a bit, until they were around $11 or so in multipacks the last time I bought any.
They also had backwards compatible 250 and 750 MB drives, but I don't know how well they ever sold. I never saw either in person. I think by the time they hit the market CD-R drives and media had dropped in price so much that Zip disks weren't economical as either a backup or file-transfer media.
That and the later drives were made cheaper and click-of-death was beginning to become an issue. My 100MB SCSI drive still works and reads the old Maxell disks no problem though.
Ah, my first tech job. It was an amazing ride going from a few hundred thousand dollars to a two billion dollar company. I bailed when things started to tank.
There was a puzzle in the MIT Mystery Hunt a few years ago where teams were given a physical Zip disk (amongst other outdated tech) and had to figure out how to read its contents :)
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...
Yep worked for a pretty large company and they had a (capable), high ranking dev guy who was prone to add easter eggs in the UI. Konami code would cause something to fly across the screen etc. The live product was taken down twice due to these easter eggs.
The amount of complexity, bugs, and security vulnerabilities in modern software is already at a staggering level purely due to non-easter-eggs. Not only will allowing the developers to occasionally have some fun help them to be more engaged (and produce higher-quality software as a result), but a well-implemented easter egg touches a highly localized portion of the system and won't introduce any of the above in the first place.
My dad worked for a rather large insurance company. One of the hacks printed the user's name, marched it around the border of the terminal (thin client to the mainframe) and then deleted itself before giving the user their prompt back.
It just didn't get more Windows than Canyon.mid. 90s corporate Memphis in musical form, the kind of thing you'd hear over a 3D computer animation -- or opening a corporate training video. Its full title was "A Trip Through the Grand Canyon" or similar; no surprise, that was also the subject of many a 3D computer animation back in the day.
A few years ago I was playing with Karplus-Strong synthesis, and I decided to dump canyon.mid into it. Note that there's no drums, I just dumped every note into the synthesizer. Also I think there were some numeric bugs with my code.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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"
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.
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...
In the 90s, the relevant user-facing OSes for computers were MacOS and Windows.
There were at least real, meaningful attempts at competition in the consumer space with, most notably, OS/2 and BeOS. (OS/2 is seen as a commercial failure these days but quite a lot of people ran it.) MS-DOS from Microsoft was also competing with IBM PC DOS and Digital Research/Novell DR-DOS.
In the early 90s, Atari TOS, RISC OS and AmigaOS were not completely down for the count yet.
In the UNIX workstation market you still had SGI IRIX, Solaris, HP/UX, and more.
Now, looking even in that space -- well, maybe there's a Linux box or two, but more likely you're going to find even more macOS and Windows.
Interesting to think that playing MIDI without any additional software is no longer a feature you can get out of the box these days (at least on macOS, YMMV).
True. Because: the sounds cards of the time had the midi synth right there on the card (ok, not the full midi decoding, but they had the OPL3 synth onboard). Later models (SB32 IIRC) could decode the midi commands themselves.
168 comments
[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 35.9 ms ] threadSong? It’s just music there’s no singing in it. Midi is an instrumental only declarative format.
Depends how prescriptive you want to be.
[1] Sorry, no link, don't remember what exactly it was.
There's nothing stopping you from using midi data to generate singing: https://youtu.be/Ab4zUFKxVpk?t=87
https://archive.org/details/win95_in_dosbox
Wait for it to boot, Start > Run, type mplayer File > Open, click In the Hall of the Mountain King.mid
:)
Original photo is from here, which has Windows 3.1 running: http://www.oldskool.org/guides/tvdog/RLRLX.html
https://youtu.be/s_XYWwCu8vM
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....
Right after I graduated, they found the budget to upgrade to blueberry iMacs. The superintendent/principal was also the only person I ever saw using a G4 Cube in the wild; that Apple salesperson must have done a hell of a job. One of the office secretaries had one of the education-market-only beige all-in-one Power Mac G3s too.
I believe sometime in the mid-2000s, they moved on to a contract with Dell like everybody else. I guess the iPad era has seen Apple regain some education market share, but they used to absolutely dominate schools.
When they were originally released, I believe the first model was SCSI-only and cost $199. Disks were $20 each and held 100MB. Eventually the price of disks dropped a bit, until they were around $11 or so in multipacks the last time I bought any.
They also had backwards compatible 250 and 750 MB drives, but I don't know how well they ever sold. I never saw either in person. I think by the time they hit the market CD-R drives and media had dropped in price so much that Zip disks weren't economical as either a backup or file-transfer media.
[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/69883/musical-easter-egg... [2] https://soundcloud.com/brianorr/clouds
I definitely don’t won’t this kind of “features” in software I use.
There are no more easter eggs.
Most likely back then there were absolutely no code reviews...
My dad worked for a rather large insurance company. One of the hacks printed the user's name, marched it around the border of the terminal (thin client to the mainframe) and then deleted itself before giving the user their prompt back.
Perhaps get an extra 50 joules of defib by putting in the Konami code on the directional keys.
I suppose they could also just document it...
It's nostalgic.
Bloomberg has dubbed us Geriatric Millennials now. I'm sorry you missed the memo.
I kind of like this version anyways though https://soundcloud.com/feepingcreature-1/canyonmid-on-a-brok...
https://www.pcjs.org/software/pcx86/sys/windows/3.10/
I couldn't get Media Player to start, I guess they don't have the sound card implemented / wired up. But they do have Visual Basic 1!
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?
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...
Medley of a bunch of pop songs on the premise they all use the same 4 chords.
https://youtu.be/5pidokakU4I
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"
https://youtu.be/q26aQKRjebI
[0]: https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/multimedia/everonward_trans....
In the 2020s, the relevant user-facing OSes for computers are MacOS and Windows.
(However, to be fair, all the rage is now in phones, where Windows is surprisingly non-existent. Apple's OS is still the other one, though.)
It has Linux kernel, but I am not sure about the GNU.
There were at least real, meaningful attempts at competition in the consumer space with, most notably, OS/2 and BeOS. (OS/2 is seen as a commercial failure these days but quite a lot of people ran it.) MS-DOS from Microsoft was also competing with IBM PC DOS and Digital Research/Novell DR-DOS.
In the early 90s, Atari TOS, RISC OS and AmigaOS were not completely down for the count yet.
In the UNIX workstation market you still had SGI IRIX, Solaris, HP/UX, and more.
Now, looking even in that space -- well, maybe there's a Linux box or two, but more likely you're going to find even more macOS and Windows.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMSdaPTuV8E
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
Today it's easier to do it in software.
https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=search&query=axel+f...
mod archive is a great site!