by MF Doom, "Outro" by M83, "Cold Desert" by Kings of Leon, and "The Edge Of The World" by DragonForce. History Origins and early examples Possibly the earliest example of a fade-out ending can be heard in Joseph Haydn's Symphony No. 45, nicknamed the "Farewell" Symphony on account of the fade-out ending. The symphony which was written in 1772 used this device as a way of courteously asking Haydn's patron Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, to whom the symphony was dedicated, to allow the musicians to return home after a longer than expected stay. This was expressed by the players extinguishing their stand candles and leaving the stage one by one during the final adagio movement of the symphony, leaving only two muted violins playing. Esterházy appears to have understood the message, allowing the musicians to leave. Gustav Holst's "Neptune, the mystic", part of the orchestral suite The Planets written between 1914 and 1916, is another early example of music having a fade-out ending during performance. Holst stipulates that the women's choruses are "to be placed in an adjoining room, the door of which is to be left open until the last bar of the piece, when it is to be slowly and silently closed", and that the final bar (scored for choruses alone) is "to be repeated until the sound is lost in the distance". Although commonplace today, the effect bewitched audiences in the era before widespread recorded sound—after the initial 1918 run-through, Holst's daughter Imogen (in addition to watching the charwomen dancing in the aisles during "Jupiter") remarked that the ending was "unforgettable, with its hidden chorus of women's voices growing fainter and fainter ... until the imagination knew no difference between sound and silence". The technique of ending a spoken or musical recording by fading out the sound goes back to the earliest days of recording. In the era of mechanical (pre-electrical) recording, this could only be achieved by either moving the sound source away from the recording horn, or by gradually reducing the volume at which the performer/s were singing, playing or speaking. With the advent of electrical recording, smooth and controllable fadeout effects could be easily achieved by simply reducing the input volume from the microphones using the fader on the mixing desk. The first experimental study on the effect of a fade-out showed that a version of a musical piece with fade-out in comparison to the