Listen to this track and tell us what it reminds you of. We’ll hold.
You’re probably traumatized by being on hold to this track.
The track is Opus No. 1, and the credits name Tim Carleton and some even name his high-school friend, Darrick Deel.
We traced the cruel and unusual punishment of call wait music back to a girder.
In 1962, the story goes, a factory owner named Alfred Levy found a problem with his phone lines. An exposed wire touching a metal girder had turned the building into a receiver, and callers on hold were hearing the radio station next door.
If that’s true, did hold music start as a wiring fault?
The oldest version of the story we found is a 2005 web page from a Tampa company that sold on-hold systems. Smithsonian magazine calls it “industry folklore.” None of them names the factory or the station.
So we went in search of the paper trail. On March 26, 1962, Levy filed for a patent on a “telephone hold program system.”
His problem was silence, because a caller on hold “hears no sound,” the patent says, and for all he knows he is “connected to a dead line.” The operator may be too busy to check in, leaving him “bereft of even this small consolation.” He hangs up or redials. The result: annoyance and a waste of time and money.
Levy’s fix was to play him music, “thereby to pacify the originator of the call.”
Any suitable source would do — a phonograph, a wire recorder, a magnetic drum recorder, a live program, the radio. It didn’t even need a direct connection: the patent allows coupling “which avoids the necessity of making a direct metallic contact.”
So no girder required.
In the late 1990s, Deel asked Carleton if Cisco could use the song as the default hold music for its first VoIP phone system. Carleton said yes.
Sixty-three years after the girder, if there even was one, Apple gave Opus No. 1 a cameo at WWDC 2025 while presenting Hold Assist, the iOS 26 feature that sits on hold so you don’t have to.
In 1983, he and Jon D. Paul filed for a system that let callers pick their own program. The reason: a held caller “may hang up, because he grows bored or because he dislikes the program being played.”
This from the man who patented hold music.
Long story short, we couldn’t quite find more on the true origin story of this one. Have you heard another version of this? If so, let us know in the comments.