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.

What you hear

Music on hold on CME points at an audio file in the router’s flash memory, set with a moh <filename> command. We found no evidence that CME shipped a bundled track the way CUCM ships Opus No. 1. So what you hear is whatever an installer loaded, or nothing at all if nobody did.

How to tell it apart

Cisco phones on the desk + hold music that isn’t Opus No. 1 = very possibly CME. Confidence is low here. If you have a CME box with a factory file on it, tell us.

The hold music

The Asterisk project ships a small sound package called asterisk-moh-opsound. It holds five tracks sourced from opsound.org, the Creative Commons music site:

The package’s own LICENSE file says they’re distributed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 “through explicit permission from their authors.” The Asterisk docs page mentions opsound’s CC BY-SA 2.5 terms. Either way, it’s share-alike with attribution, and that’s why these are the real recordings, not recreations. Hit play above.

How to be sure

If you hear one of these five, you’re almost certainly talking to Asterisk or something built on it: FreePBX, a Grandstream UCM, or one of countless hosted systems. Many installers never change the default class.

So if you can name the track (see the Asterisk page for all five), you can’t tell FreePBX from bare Asterisk by ear alone. Either way, it’s the Asterisk family.

What you hear

IP Office doesn’t ship a song. It looks for a file named HoldMusic.wav (8 kHz, 16-bit, mono PCM). If nobody uploaded one and no external source is plugged in, Avaya’s documentation says it plays a double beep tone: 425 Hz, repeated 0.2/0.2/0.2/3.4 seconds on/off.

The clip above is built to exactly that spec and passed through a simulated phone line. We measured our own output at 425.0 Hz with edges at 0, 0.19, 0.40, 0.59, then 4.0 seconds.

Why so many businesses have it

The beep sounds like the phone system is broken, so plenty of offices have run IP Office for years assuming it was a fault. It’s just the default. Upload a HoldMusic.wav to the system’s primary folder and it goes away.

Dial *341# from an IP Office extension to hear whatever the system hold source is set to.

What you hear

Mitel’s MiVoice Office 400 documentation says that when no music source is set, “a repeating double ringing tone is played.” It’s a hold tone, not a song, the same idea as Avaya IP Office’s beep.

Careful: Office 400 and MiVoice Business are different product lines. We haven’t found a primary MiVoice Business document that states its own default, so the double ring is only confirmed for Office 400. On MiVoice Business, file-based music on hold plays a file Mitel’s docs call a “standard melody” (moh.wav) or whatever replaced it. We couldn’t find a title or composer.

We haven’t found the tone’s frequency or cadence in a spec, so we haven’t synthesized one. If you have a clean recording, send it.

The mystery

We found plenty of evidence that the stock track exists and none that names it. If you know the title, or you have the file from an old ShoreTel install, tell us. This is exactly the kind of thing this page exists to pin down.

We couldn’t find a composer, title or license for the stock track, so there’s nothing we can play here. Admins replace it under Settings → Music on Hold.

The stock track’s title and composer aren’t documented anywhere we could find.

If you recognize a track from the Asterisk page, a Grandstream UCM is one of several possible sources.

• DefaultHold.wma, installed with the Office client under Office15\Media. The client plays it when you put someone on hold, unless a policy points somewhere else.
• cpsmoh.wma, used by the server-side Call Park service when a parked call has no custom music.

Both are WMA files bundled with the product. Microsoft doesn’t name a composer, so there’s nothing we can legally play here.

Microsoft doesn’t publish a title or composer.

What callers heard

Base 1A2 equipment had no audio path to a held line. Hold was silence. Music needed a separate add-on card wired into the KSU, and whatever the installer connected to it played through an isolation transformer. Usually that was a radio.

Confidence is low because we’re working from key-system references and collector sites, not a Western Electric manual page. The silence part is well supported. The specific card models are from forum lore.

It also predates the whole idea. Alfred Levy’s patent for a “telephone hold program system” was filed in 1962 and granted April 12, 1966.

What callers heard

The Merlin Legend manual tells installers to pick the jack “reserved for connection of a music source, such as a radio, tape player, or stereo system.” Only one music jack is allowed per system. There was no built-in tune. With nothing plugged in, hold was silent.

The same manual warns about copyright. Retransmitting licensed music to callers needs permission, and a radio station’s broadcast license doesn’t cover a business piping it down phone lines. Plenty of offices plugged in a radio anyway, which is why “hold music” sometimes meant a local DJ and a mattress ad.

The clip above is a stand-in: a public-domain tune on a worn loop cassette, the other common source back then.

What callers heard

Music on hold came from an external source (a tuner, a CD player, or an announcement board) wired to an analog port and administered as the system’s music source. There was no factory song. A station’s Class of Restriction even decides whether its held callers hear music at all.

Communication Manager kept the same idea. We found no bundled default track for it either.

What callers heard

Music on hold required an external audio source feeding a music trunk card, configured as a MUS route. There’s no built-in melody. Without that, held callers get a tone or silence, depending on how the system was set up.

What callers heard

Norstar programming offers a three-way On hold setting: Music, Silence, or Tones. “Music” only works if an audio source is punched down to the system’s music port, since there’s no internal tune. Otherwise callers hear dead air or a repeating tone.

What callers heard

Music on hold needed a separate Music-On-Hold/Paging module (the SX-2000 used a DNIC Music-On-Hold/Pager unit) fed by an external source. Mitel treated paging and hold music as one “external audio” feature. No card or no source meant no music.

Medley A and Medley B

An Electra Elite 48 owner on a phone-tech forum listed the two options “as shown in the manual”:

• Medley A: American Folk Song Medley
• Medley B: Christmas Song Medley

On at least the Electra Elite 48, one owner reported there wasn’t even an external option. It was A or B. The thread started with an office asking how to stop the music because nobody could stand it anymore.

That’s one owner’s report. We haven’t found the NEC manual page itself, and later NEC manuals (IPK, SV8100, SV9100) describe a synthesized tone or an external source instead. Treat the medleys as likely but unconfirmed. We also don’t have a song list, so we haven’t synthesized a guess. If you’ve got an Electra Elite on a bench, a recording would settle it.

SV8100 / SV9100

NEC’s later Univerge systems kept an internal synthesized source, stored as proprietary .dat files in firmware. One installer on a forum called it “carnival type music.” Newer firmware can play a tone instead.

The myth

People online say Panasonic systems had a built-in melody chip. The KX-TA824 programming manual lists exactly two music-on-hold sources: External (the factory default) and Tone. With nothing plugged into the music port, callers hear silence. The bigger KX-TDA adds an “Internal” source slot, but we found no factory tune documented for it.

The later KX-NS can hold up to eight uploaded WAV files, one active at a time (System Program 711), or use an external source or a tone. We found no factory melody there either.

If you have Panasonic documentation that names a built-in tune, we’ll happily correct this.

What callers heard

Music on hold meant wiring an analog port to an external interface box that matched impedance to a consumer or pro hold-music player. No internal melody.

What callers heard

The OfficeServ documentation lists the default music-on-hold source as NONE. Until an installer assigns something, hold is silent. It’s one of the clearest defaults in this whole collection.

What the manuals actually say

For this project we checked programming manuals and installer forums for more than a dozen legacy systems: AT&T Merlin and Partner, DEFINITY, Nortel Meridian and Norstar, Mitel SX-200, Toshiba Strata, Panasonic KX, ROLM/Siemens, and Samsung OfficeServ. None of them documents a factory melody chip. The real defaults were:

• An external jack you were supposed to plug a radio, tape deck or CD player into
• A tone, like Avaya IP Office’s 425 Hz double beep
• Silence, like Samsung’s default source of literally “NONE”

The only legacy system where we found even an owner’s report of built-in music is NEC’s Electra Elite. That was medleys (folk songs or Christmas songs), not Für Elise, and we still haven’t seen the manual page.

So where did the beeping Beethoven come from?

We don’t know yet, and we’d rather say that than make something up. Likely suspects worth running down:

• Aftermarket music-on-hold boxes sold to plug into those external jacks
• Consumer two-line phones and cordless handsets with their own hold button
• Doorbells, greeting cards and toys using the same cheap melody ICs, blending in memory

The clips above are our own recreations of what people describe: public-domain tunes on a simple square-wave voice, run through a simulated 8 kHz phone line. They are not recordings of any specific product.

Got proof? A manual page, a part number, or a recording off real hardware that names the system: send it, and this page gets rewritten with credit.