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Canyon.mid

canyonmid.com

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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.

A good jumping-off point: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/39pqsBTsb9UNYv1dXbZpff?si=...

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"

Awesome find. Here they are on YT, I was the 97th subscriber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chod_eCaGWI

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.

Thank you for this!

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.

I actually quite like the KPMG anthem's jungle remix: https://soundcloud.com/joey-devilla/the-kpmg-song-jungle-sty...

How about the Capgemini rap? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZHCnDVHzqv4

When I think four chord song I think of Axis Of Awesome :)

Medley of a bunch of pop songs on the premise they all use the same 4 chords.

https://youtu.be/5pidokakU4I

Relevant Tantacrul video about the current era of corporate music: https://youtu.be/AIxY_Y9TGWI

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.

There is also a documentary on the subject:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Library-Music-Film-Shawn-Lee/dp/B08...

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.

In the old days you had to sing the corporate song yourself, e.g. Ever Onward I.B.M.[0]

[0]: https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/multimedia/everonward_trans....

Ever Onward IBM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9oh3gqOEKU

https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/punched-cards/2/1...

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...

Gets me fired up to jump over a dolphin. Weird.

https://youtu.be/q26aQKRjebI

Obligatory post http://datassette.net/businessfunk/

it's incredible the number of things you can do with eggs

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...

[1] https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/69883/musical-easter-egg... [2] https://soundcloud.com/brianorr/clouds

I miss those good times when developers were given freedom to do things like these.

They weren't given the freedom. They took the freedom.

Life-insurance mainframes never had easter-eggs, did they? This is just a measure of how seriously people rely on software.

Wrong. :)

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.

I stand corrected. At least it wasn't the policyholder's name.

I’d love to see if Philips of Zoll integrated any Easter eggs into their AEDs or monitoring equipment.

Perhaps get an extra 50 joules of defib by putting in the Konami code on the directional keys.

I think nowadays an easter egg would be a hard sell on a Pull Request...

Most likely back then there were absolutely no code reviews...

You can thank the need to appeal to the 'serious business' people for that

Windows XP has no easter eggs because MS wanted to sell it to the US military, and the policy was, no undocumented features.

I suppose they could also just document it...

Except that it increases software complexity, possibly bugs as well as security vulnerabilities.

I definitely don’t won’t this kind of “features” in software I use.

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.

There are no more easter eggs.

How did the eggs cause the product to go down?

Sad times. If you never accidentally trigger these then who cares…

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.

I miss the good times when security wasn't an important thing to always keep in mind because there weren't that many hackers and script kiddies.

I don't won't you

I really appreciate the wuality of discussion here. Every time.

Happy developers are engaged and make fewer errors.

"Creative Labs Sound Blaster"... ah the nostalgia

Canyon is good, but Passport.mid is the superior Windows midi file...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV9BtuPpW9w

Let’s not forget about onestop.mid

The king of all prebuilt windows midis!

I haven't heard this music in about twenty years!

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!!!

Amazing! Love the feeling of rediscovery and reawakening of some long dormant neural pathways brought about by hearing a forgotten piece of music

Ah yes.

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

Agreed, wouldn’t have been out of place in a Maxis game.

“Object Packager”! I’d spend hours trying to figure out what you could do with a utility sporting such a cool name & icon.

Did anyone ever use it for its mysterious but intended purpose?

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.

This reinterpretation of the song is really amazing https://youtu.be/bjWFNgKE4uw

I also did one a while back if anyone is interested.

https://youtu.be/s_XYWwCu8vM

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.

That's honestly why I do them. To make the sound that 10 year old me actually heard when listening.

Now you're just showing off playing all the instruments. :-D :horns:

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

Hehe. It's because I'm incapable of finishing a project in any reasonable timeframe. There might have been six months between takes for all I know.

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.

Speaking of those classic weather channel vibes: https://m.twitch.tv/retroweatherchannel

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 :)

Very cool, the beginning has a Weather Report - Birdland vibe to it.

Windows 3.11 on a Tandy 1000... that's a hack right there (http://www.oldskool.org/guides/tvdog/1kfaq.html#III.C.1) ;)

It seems to be a Tandy 1000 RSX which supports Windows 3.1

Original photo is from here, which has Windows 3.1 running: http://www.oldskool.org/guides/tvdog/RLRLX.html

It's a 386SX, which absolutely will run Windows 3.1 but if you're going to be real picky, it definitely won't be as snappy as in the video ;)

Question is, would you be able to put a Soundblaster 16 inside it?

Tandy 3-voice can play midi without an add on card.

Right but I know Yamaha OPL sound when I hear it.

The Tandy 1000 RSX has several ISA expansion slots. Putting a Sound Blaster in it is no problem.

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.

Thanks for sharing this! My sister and I used to love listening to this song on our Gateway 2000 when we were kids.

> listening to this song

Song? It’s just music there’s no singing in it. Midi is an instrumental only declarative format.

How am I only just learning that a a piece of music is only a song if it has vocals? Even the name makes that obvious.

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.

Depends how prescriptive you want to be.

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").

No no no, the second letter functions like a power button. i means on, and o means off. "Song" means the vocals are off.

> 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

Here's a much weirder example of using midi data to generate singing: https://youtu.be/ZY6h3pKqYI0

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constant-Q_transform

This is absolutely terrifying and I hate it. Congratulations to the author, it's very interesting!

Here's another nice example of this - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRlhKaxcKpA

That is low-key terrifying. And amazing, too.

Since when does a song require singing..?

It's literally in the name

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.

Boooo.

What does that mean?

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.

If I ever start my own company with a real phone system, I’m putting canyon.mid as the on hold music. How cool would that be?

What is a company phone system? You mean, you're going to write a bot that plays music while gathering information? /s

"Please hold, your call is important to us!" ♪♪

Gen X-ers and Older Millennials will request to be put on hold again just to jam out to that Windows 3.1 nostalgia.

> Older Millennials

Bloomberg has dubbed us Geriatric Millennials now. I'm sorry you missed the memo.

Elder Millennials!

I learned the other day that there's an in-between called Xennials.

I think "computery" music (synthesized on the user's device from individual notes) reached its peak with tracker/keygen music: https://www.stef.be/bassoontracker/ That was maybe the last moment before video games switched to recorded music, and chiptunes became a nostalgia genre.

For the game I'm developing, I'm making its music in Amiga Protracker. I'm probably going to render it down with MikMod or similar for the actual game tracks, but the intent is to capture that 90s vibe.

I didn’t know how much I wanted to hear and see this. Much nostalgia.

It suddenly occurs to me that I always thought I missed the most interesting times in computer history, but I actually experienced the majority of major changes (about DOS onwards).

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.

PASSPORT.MID is pretty cool, too.

Oh, Passport was the tits. It had a little funk in it at least.

Story of the song is here: http://vgmpf.com/Wiki/index.php/Trip_Through_the_Grand_Canyo...

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.

I kind of like this version anyways though https://soundcloud.com/feepingcreature-1/canyonmid-on-a-brok...

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.

This has to be a GTP-3 bot.

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 :)

I think there were indeed some 3rd-party zip disks. I had several drives, thought they were really cool at the time.

live : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8eRgGS4SuJ8

If you like that song you will like this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMSdaPTuV8E

LGR would approve.

Since we're all reminiscing here, let me throw in Michael Walthius's Echoes from 1994 which totally dragged me deep into the MIDI collecting world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQyhRd0Wsew

Ha! Michael Walthius was one of my primary inspirations when I was trying to make my own midi arrangements. I was just a kid trying to self-teach music theory and composition.

In the 90s, the relevant user-facing OSes for computers were MacOS and Windows.

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.)

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.

Its all because RMS decided to eat that thing from his foot that one time. The world just couldn't stomach GNU/Linux after that. :P

Isn't Android technically GNU/Linux?

It has Linux kernel, but I am not sure about the GNU.

the average phone has software with virtually every existing oss-license within and noone cares.

I remember playing this on my Gravis Ultrasound and trying to convince my friends it sounded better. (https://youtu.be/Q3rb5Yi0BBI)

Gravis Ultrasound playing TIE Fighter music is the pinnacle of game music for me.

The soundtrack to level 1 of Chips Challenge.

A decade or so back I got to take a tour of London's Italian Quarter. It's mostly gone now but fragments still exist, like the Chiappa mechanical-organ factory: https://www.facebook.com/chiappalimited

It would be an amazingly cool hack to adapt a pipe-organ to play Midi tracks off a USB key.

Or, the flipside, to design a machine that could print pipe-organ rolls from MIDI tracks.

For reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SQHdFAm7g7E -- controlling a pipe organ via MIDI

The PCjs machine below starts Microsoft Windows 3.10, using an IBM PC AT running PC DOS 3.30.

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!

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.

Today it's easier to do it in software.

My favorite old midi file is this one. It's playable in winamp or any other thing with a default wavetable for midi synth. It was the background music for an NES puzzle game, transcribed to midi.

https://www.khinsider.com/midi/nes/pipe-dream

I can immediately tell that this was not recorded with the same midi synth as my old win 95 PC.

Booting the old Windows 3.11 box just to listen to canyon.mid, then shutting it down again.

Clint "LGR" Basinger collects 90s-era MIDI gear, and made a video of his stack playing this track.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMSdaPTuV8E

I encourage you to read the first sentence of QuadrupleA‘s comment to this post in LGR’s voice.

I took you up on your suggestion and found it quite satisfying. =)

Man I feel old knowing I was alive early enough to have found that midi file amazing.

Oh goodness, the nostalgia chills. Now to find In the Hall of the Mountain King.

If you want the full experience:

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

I miss Axel F mod files.

I don't know that artist in particular, but perhaps you can find them on The Mod Archive?

https://modarchive.org/index.php?request=search&query=axel+f...

Axel F is the theme tune from 80s film Beverly Hills Cop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6E93VEydSRM

mod archive is a great site!

Wow, I haven't heard this in twenty years or so. I think I found it searching through the windows folder pre-internet looking for something to do.

I've used this as my ringtone for several years now. I think it's perfect for it. And I just love the memories it brings.

I don't think I ever listened to this on a computer with a good sound card. I don't remember it ever sounding so good.

I had this for years a my default ring tone.

Hah most PCs I used of that era would have complained about a non-bootable disk being in drive A: :)

A real treat was listening to this on the Yamaha softsynth software that came with my IBM Aptiva.

I think it would've been even more immersive if the screen was warped to cover the CRT

On that theme, have you tried cool-retro-term?

It's nostalgic.

This almost makes me cry. I forgot all about it.

Sounds like something Vulfpeck should cover.

I miss Windows 3.11 so much. It was so much more clean and intuitive than today Windows...

I thought that a while ago... So much so, that I wrote a Proof of Concept 'Program Manager' for Windows 10 that re-imagined my current Start Menu in a Windows 3.1 style.

Oh. My. God. The whole paradigm falls down when you've got so many folders full of apps. I don't know how to solve it.

It worked well back in the day though when most people only had a handful of apps (that we used to call 'software') installed.

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