If you’ve been on hold with a big organization in the last 25 years, you have heard Opus No. 1. It’s the default music on hold for Cisco’s CallManager, renamed Unified Communications Manager (CUCM) in 2007.
Where it came from
Tim Carleton first wrote the melody at about age 10. In 1989 he fleshed it out on a Yamaha DX7 synthesizer he bought with his 16th-birthday money and recorded it on a four-track Tascam Portastudio. “It was just a practice song,” he told Smithsonian Magazine. The tape sat on a shelf.
In the late 1990s his childhood friend Darrick Deel, who’d been in the room for the recording, was working at Cisco. Deel talked him into submitting it as the company’s default hold music. “It was supposed to be an Easter egg snuck onto a phone system,” Carleton said. Cisco initially used it for free, and it eventually became the only music Cisco supplied on its phone systems.
What it sounds like
Mid-tempo, dreamy, late-80s new age. Think Yanni and Kitaro, which Carleton names as influences. Smooth synth pads, a melody that loops just long enough that you start humming along, then loops again.
How to be sure
- If it’s Opus No. 1, the organization is almost certainly running Cisco CallManager / CUCM (or a hosted Cisco platform).
- Cisco also ships a second file,
SampleAudioSource, in four codec flavors. Admins can swap either one out. - Cisco’s small-business router-based platform (CME / UC500) is a different product. See Cisco CME.
We can’t host the track (it’s copyrighted), but Carleton put it on streaming services. The official upload is linked above.