From random beeps to Crazy Frog and traditional phone ringing to the latest pop songs, mobile phones have been making a variety of noises over the years to try to make owners aware of their incoming calls. While it’s a hassle for everyone else, some people take pride in selecting the right melody for their ringtone. The ringtone market is worth a lot of money these days with subscription services available that give people access to hundreds of ringtones available.
The earliest and possibly best-known identifiable music ringtone is Nokia’s ringtone, which debuted in 1994 on its 2110 model phone. The Finnish company even went so far as to trademark the sound as it became synonymous with company phones. As mobile phones became popular, people wanted different ringtones to stand out from the crowd. The phones only came with a number of selectable tones present which mainly involved beeps and beeps arranged to formulate some resemblance to a melody, known as monophonic ringtones.
Manufacturers then began to include software in phones that allowed people to create their own ringtones. This involved entering long sequences of button presses into the phone with each entry representing a note. The playback speed was then selected to play the melody of a popular song. This input method was very cumbersome, but it allowed people to have any ringtone they wanted and proved very popular with the younger crowd. People can be very creative and being able to create or input the characters needed to recreate the latest pop songs could make you very popular on the playground.
The next stage was polyphonic ringtones that were capable of playing multiple notes at once and thus could create more varied tones. This allowed different sounds to be combined, for example a piano sound could be played with a drum and guitar sound to recreate songs. Companies began to appear that sold this type of ringtones that offered subscription services to access a database full of ringtones. Polyphonic ringtones come in MIDI file format and can be easily transferred from one phone to another using the WAP system.
As phones became more technologically capable and capable of playing pure MP3 music, this moved over to the ringtone side and allowed users to put any song file they wanted on their phone and use it for call notifications or text messages. The companies still offer their subscription services that allow people to easily buy new songs as they are released if they want to easily download the latest songs. Some also offer video ringtones that play the accompanying music video along with the ringtone.