Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being

Chapter 4. Music@Microsoft.Windows: Composing Ambience

130 why does Microsoft Windows play music on startup? As is well known, all Windows versions except for 3.1 have a brief (four- to six-second) piece of music indicating that Windows is booted and ready for use. Each version has unique music, though as I will show, Windows 95’s startup music, written by Brian Eno, and Windows Vista’s music, written by Robert Fripp, share musical motifs. Nor is the music of Windows just an idle proposition, an afterthought: Eno and Fripp are wellknown musicians with strong ties to the avant-garde, and they were well paid for their work. So to repeat the question: why have startup music for Windows, music that takes significant time and expense to develop and implement? c h A P T e R 4 music@microsoft.windows composing Ambience Modern culture has little appreciation for the emotional importance of hearing, and thus attaches little value to the art of auditory spatial awareness. —Blesser and Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening The best way to comprehend what I mean by acoustic design is to regard the soundscape of the world as a huge musical composition, unfolding around us ceaselessly. We are simultaneously its audience, its performers, and its composers. —R. Murray Schafer, The Soundscape The first marriage of visual and auditory art occurred when Paleolithic painters discovered that their paintings of hoofed animals were more intense if they were located in caves producing echoes. Most important, like biological evolution, aural architecture has its own rules for survival, mutation, reproduction, and extinction. —Blesser and Salter, Spaces Speak, Are You Listening music@microsoft.windows 131MMM No obvious need warrants this startup music. While an auditory signal of some kind is useful, a beep or some other semantically functional sound would suffice, as was the case with Windows 3.1. Considering the matter in terms of purely professional utility, startup music seems unjustified; it is an aesthetic nicety, window dressing, as it were, and an oddly expensive and pretentious one if successful avant-garde musicians are involved. While the music may indicate that Windows has booted, it bears no immediately discernible relation to the various uses to which we might put Windows , such as working, gaming, communicating, browsing, and so forth. Startup music, or any kind of music, is not functional in this sense. Indeed, we might be tempted to go so far as to agree with the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker, author of many well-known books on mind and language, who argues that our appreciation of music serves no evolutionary function. While it may offer a few benefits here and there, they are primarily ones of pleasure; thus, music is a kind of “auditory cheesecake” (Pinker 534). Seen from such a long-view, utilitarian perspective, Windows’s startup music is little more than digital dessert. It is a bit of sweet, pleasant trifle but ultimately unnecessary for functionality. This fairly common view reflects the profound neglect of music prevalent in all scholarly arenas that attempt to understand human beings and their development, save perhaps ethnomusicology and music departments (see Mithen). As a rhetorician, however, I am suspicious of the separation of form and content that structures this narrative: Windows is a transparent, functional entity allowing us to conduct our business (even if our business is pleasure), and the startup music is the flourish, the rhetorical ornament dressing up Windows’s transparent instrumentality. And basically the same narrative is often used to dismiss rhetoric, which is too often seen as the decorative frill dressing up language to make it more pleasing, persuasive , or seductive but in the end unimportant and even pernicious because it impedes the facts we can transparently represent in communicative linguistic utility. This narrative dates back at least to Plato, who used it to trump rhetoric with philosophy, and it rouses my suspicions if it is applied to understanding why Windows has startup music. Something else is at stake. More precisely, I am going to argue that examining something as small as an operating system’s startup music can open a window on understanding our relation to computers and computer software. Microsoft Windows and similar entities are not just operating systems or software we use; rather, they constitute an actual environment, and in so doing, they require an extension of our modes of comportment to include more com- 132 chapter four plete reflections of the human. A functionalist view...