Most famous 4 seconds of music ever?

This morning's Philadelphia Inquirer contained this interesting article...

Microsoft searches for just-right sound
By Allison Linn, Associated Press

Click the headline to read the full piece, but here's the "meat" of the story...

SEATTLE—Some musicians spend 18 months working on a whole album. At Microsoft Corp., that's how long it took to perfect just four seconds of sound.

Of course, this isn't just any four-second clip. It's the sound—a soft da-dum, da-dumm, with a lush fade-out—that millions of computer users will hear every day, and perhaps thousands of times in total, when they turn on computers running Microsoft's forthcoming Windows Vista operating system.

To set the right tone—clean, simple, but with "some long-term legs," according to Microsoft's Steve Ball—the software maker recruited musician Robert Fripp.

Fripp, best known for his work with the '70s rock band King Crimson, recorded hours of his signature layered, guitar-driven sound for the project, under the close direction of Ball and others at Microsoft. Then, it was Ball's job to sort through those hours of live recordings to suss out just the right few seconds.

. . . .

If it seems like overkill to go to all that trouble for a few seconds of sound, consider this: Microsoft estimates that the clips such as the e-mail alert will be played trillions of times in years to come.

That's a lot of opportunity to annoy, offend—or, if the job is done right—please or appease computer users the world over.

One major concern was that the start-up sound not grow grating after a 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.

. . . .

That last bit is what so many advertisers seem to forget, that an ad (in this case the Windows signature tune) should at the very least NOT be annoying on repeated exposures. So many ads are interesting or clever upon the first encounter, but after that they're just annoying because you already know the "clever twist" and therefore it's no longer a clever twist. There has to be something else about a spot to make it of interest even when repeated.

Ads like those involving the Budweiser iguanas Frank & Louie illustrate perfectly what I consider to be an ideal ad campaign. Frank & Louie were well-written and acted characters that were entertaining even on subsequent viewings of the exact same ad. It also helped that Budweiser had made several versions and rotated them throughout a program, thus cutting down on the repetitiveness.

Of course, I don't drink alcoholic beverages (never have) so the ads did not actually sell me any of their beer, but at least I could tolerate them (and even look forward to them at times) from an audio/visual entertainment aspect.