About a month ago oferico told me we need some sound events for our "product". You know, those tiny little "woohoo!" noises sound to notify you when "something happens" on your computer. As a music lover I got curious about these little analogue sounds that most of the time are just too minor to be noticed, so you can hardly imagine that someone actually set down to compose them. I mean, have you ever got to think about who actually wrote the Windows startup sound? Or the "Intel Inside" sound?

Well, the deeper my research got, I discovered it to be even more fascinating than I imagined. In fact, it opened me up to a brand new world of music!

First thing I discovered was that Brian Eno, also known as the Godfather of modern Ambient Music was the one who created the startup sound for the Windows 95 operating system. For those not familiar with him, he was a member of Roxy Music and he was the producer of 6 of U2's albums including Zooropa, Achtung baby and Joshua Tree. PLUS he collaborated with David Bowie, John Cale, Paul Simon, Slowdive, James and many others (phhweee!). Ironically, he created the Windows 95 startup sound on his Mac...

Here's an interesting explanation of how he did it:

"The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas. I'd been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, "Here's a specific problem - solve it." The thing from the agency said, "We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional," this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said "and it must be 3¼ seconds long." I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It's like making a tiny little jewel. In fact, I made 84 pieces. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. 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."

Continuing my research, I found that the Windows Vista operating system sound was created by Steve Ball, a self-proclaimed renaissance man who is both an engineer and a musician, with the help of 20 (!!!) other musicians, composers, sound designers, engineers, and developers. One of them was Robert Fripp, best known for his work with the '70s rock band King Crimson.

It took 18 months to come up with that perfect 4-second sound. After all, 200 million PC users will hear that sound every day when switching on their computers. The sound had to be clean, simple and mostly something that will not grow grating after a period of time.

"You want a sound that people will love the first time they hear it, but it's a paradox to also say, 'Oh and by the way, we need people to love it the tenth, or the hundredth, or the thousandth time they hear it," Ball said. "We want you to know they're there, and you would miss them if they were gone, but we would like them to be just barely noticeable, almost like they are part of the environment or part of your wallpaper," he said. "We want them in the background, rather than the foreground."

Well, as opposed to Ball's statement, we at 8hands will never want people to sweat around only to produce 3 and 1/4 seconds of sound. BUT - we did manage to put our hands on one of the coolest electronic musical instruments ever and we are willing to give it away just for you.

This is the official invitation for the 8hands sound event competition!

If you are a musician or just love to play around with analogue tones this could be your chance to enter 8hands’ hall of fame and win an incredible Theremin!

Here is a short example of how this magical instrument works. Basically, the Theremin is a unique instrument that was designed to be played without being touched. To play the Theremin, you just need to move your hands around the two metal antennas:

All you need to do is send us your beeps and sounds! Think of the 8hands logo as a source for inspiration: A sweet little octopus who loves and lives on the Net. Try to imagine it saying "Hey, something interesting just happened!" or "Dude, you gotta take a look at this!" and translate it into short organic sounds. Take a look also at some of the different 8hands logo "flavors" on the Flickr badge on the right. Sounds can be e-mailed to this address. And don't be afraid to send us even weird stuff, we are much more open minded than you might think... :-) If you have any questions regarding the 8hands sounds events challenge, feel free to ask away.

peace and love, goldi.