ALL ABOUT RINGTONES

THE HISTORY OF RINGTONES In 1997, your cell phone could make two kinds of sounds. It could “ring” or it could play a single-line melody. At about this time, Nokia, the Finnish cell-phone company, introduced “smart messaging,” a protocol that allowed people to send text messages to one another over their phones, and Vesa-Matti Paananen, a Finnish computer programmer, realized that it would work equally well for transmitting bits of songs. Paananen developed software called Harmonium that enabled people to program their cell phones to make musically complex sequences (melodies with rudimentary harmonic and rhythmic accompaniment) that they could forward to friends using smart messaging. The first ring tones were sold in 2001 in Finland. At that time, Finnish teenagers were right into SMS (Short Messaging Service) cellular technology. Every teenager seemed to have a cellphone and, as you looked around the streets, you could see them all typing away with their thumbs, sending text messages back and forth. According to the GSM Association, a mobile communications trade group, roughly 50 billion short text messages were sent worldwide during the first three months of the year. Nokia is the world’s biggest cellular phone manufacturer. They’ve learned that the way to find out what people want is to watch them to see what they’re doing and, from that, figure out what they want. Nokia’s obviously good at that. The cellular industry was only reaching about 20% of the teenage and college-student markets, and that had to improve. So they watched, and found out that teenagers, especially girls, loved to talk on the phone. Research also revealed that these girls were very fashion-conscious. What they wanted was customizable, sleek and small cellphones. So Nokia provided teenagers with interchangeable faceplates, colorful covers and funky antennas. Boost Mobile, a prepaid cellular company majority-owned by Nextel, was the first to unveil a phone targeted at teenage girls who like to hang out with their friends, surfing and snowboarding. Their phones come with nearly 500 ring tones, and feature pop-music songs such as “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun”, “Like a Virgin”, “Funky Town”, “California Dreamin’”, and “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go.” Sounds like the old transistor radios we used to hear around the beach. Meanwhile, Japan, ever the competitor in the electronics market, was also in the race. JASRAC, the Japanese copyright organization collected more than $113 million in royalties for ring tones on cellphones in 2003. Last year, ring tone sales worldwide increased by 40% to $3.5 billion. WHAT IS A RINGTONE? Almost everyone in the western industrialised world has heard a ringtone. The term today applies almost exclusively to those sometimes irritating but always informative sounds that mobile phones (cell phones) make. The main reason for the differences in ringtones is so that people can recognise their own phones ringing when others may have theirs ringing. It is only with the advent of computers in mobile phones that ringtones have become as sophisiticated. A ringtone can also be considered the sounds that you hear when you are on the phone waiting for the other person to pick up. WHY ARE RINGTONES IMPORTANT? The obvious reason for a ringtone is to alert the phone owner that they have an incoming call that should be attended to. It could be argued that ringtones are not important at all and just cause a public nuisance. Australia's channel 9 Today Program reported that some Australian workplaces have instituted fines for ringtones that sound during meetings. Ringtones are probably of great significance to the economy as a major source of income to companies selling these tones. Also music companies get royalties for selling tunes to ringtone companies. HOW DO RINGTONES WORK? A ringtone relies on the computing power of the mobile phone. The common ringtone is actually programmed through a language called Ringing Tone Text Transfer Language (RTTTL) format, developed by Nokia. Different mobile phones use different systems for encoding ringtones on their devices but most are delivered directly to your phone as part of an SMS system. There are now three main types of ringtones: monophonic (the standard and first type), polyphonic ringtones and TrueTone. The main difference is that monophonic just means that only one tone or sound can be played at a time. Polyphonic means several notes can be played at once. Some mobile phones you can set the ringtone to be different depending on the incoming caller. This seems to be useful to dodge nuisance callers.

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