Short History of Cellphone Ringtones

RobotWisdom writes "This week's New Yorker magazine includes an interesting short history of cellphone ringtones, including statistics on their (huge) profitability worldwide. My favorite quote: 'I spent three days of productive work time listening to polyphonic ringtone versions of speed metal, trying to find exactly the ringtone that expressed my personality with enough irony and enough coolness that I could live with it going off ten times a day. In a quiet room, in a meeting, this phone's gonna go off-- what are they going to hear?'"

Comments

A shorter history of ringtones

[ackthpt]

A shorter history of ringtones:

Kewl

Neat

Cute

Distracting

Bothersome

Highly Annoying

Obnoxious

Grating

"Hello, is the proctologist available? I need something removed from somewhere."

coming soon: ringtones with thx 5.1 surround, so everyone can enjoy your taste in interruption melodies!

Re:A shorter history of ringtones

[EnronHaliburton2004]

That's when you walk up to the woman and say "Pardon me Miss, but when I was your age we had manners."

and a few seconds later you say "Pardon me Miss, but when I was your age we didn't slap strange people at cafes."

Re:A shorter history of ringtones

[YukiKotetsu]

You should have slapped that old woman with a grape scented ram-head double dildo. Why grape scented? To cover up the fermaldehyde. Seriously, I am so sick of hearing rude people and their cell phones - at work, when I'm eating, when I'm in the freaking movie theater... if I could just do something just as rude, as say, slapping them with a double-dong out of spite in public, we'd be even. Maybe they'd stop then. Okay, maybe cherry scented would do.

Re:A shorter history of ringtones

[BubbleDragon]

*cough* I suppose it's ok when said /. reader is a woman?

The sound of silence

[spywarearcata.com]

"In a quiet room, in a meeting, this phone's gonna go off--what are they going to hear?"

Among polite people, or, failing that, with a mobile phone jammer enabled--nothing.

Re:The sound of silence

[lukewarmfusion]

At the very most, they might hear my phone's vibration mode.

In college, we used to make a game of calling people in class to see if they remembered to turn their ringers off. Paul lost pretty much every time, rewarding us with a disruptive version of the Notre Dame fight song.

In an important meeting, my phone is on silence mode - no ringer at all. If I didn't do that, I'd never get anything done.

Re:The sound of silence

[Anonymous Coward]

This approach can be useful in the courtroom as well... If your opponent is as retarded as mine is.

Doesn't help to start things off with a pissed judge.

Re:The sound of silence

[Lumpy]

we have one of those here too. we grabbed her cellphone when she was away and uploaded a ringtone for her (I've got copies of ringtone making software) we changed her ringtone to "HEY LOOK! I'M AN ASS WHO LIKES LOUD RINGS!" said loudly by a co-worker.

after that she stopped leaving her cellphone on her desk.

Meetings...

[darkstar949]

They are going to hear that you have too much time on you hands...

Re:Meetings...

[MarkGriz]

"They are going to hear that you have too much time on you hands..."

Especially if you uploaded a Styx ringtone.

Ringtone story

[suso]

I was with my wife in a pizza place a few years ago and we happened to be talking about baseball (once in about probably 10 times I've talked about it in my life) and right then the girl's cell phone in the booth next to us goes off and plays "Take me out the ballgame". That was a weird coincidence.

I made my own long and dissonant ringtone for text messages so that it will wake me up at night if a server goes down.

Re:Ringtone story

[EngMedic]

and right then the girl's cell phone in the booth next to us goes off and plays "Take me out the ballgame". That was a weird coincidence.

i have a better one. the ambulance crew and myself had just rolled into the ER with our patient, who had jumped a fence while chasing some vandals. The cop is in to take his statement, and the cop's personal ringone goes off. It is, natch, "bad boys bad boys, whatcha gonna do".

This Story is about PHONES!!

[Black-Man]

Vibrating is the "other" useful battery powered utility that a woman can't live without!!

Re:This Story is about PHONES!!

[david.given]

Vibrating is the "other" useful battery powered utility that a woman can't live without!

Yeah. Just take a look at this...

Alas, it doesn't seem to be, uh, compatible with my hardware, but I can't help wondering --- does it work?

Re:The only ringtone needed EVAR

[DrEldarion]

Lies! Clearly the only ringtone ever needed is the song from level one of Super Mario 2. I have yet to hear anyone say anything but "That is AWESOME" when they hear it.

Fav ringtones

[Anonymous Coward]

My favorite ringtone was discussed in this slashdot article a couple of days ago.

No! No more tunes!

[rueger]

God - the world does not need musical ring tones. Really, we don't. Without doubt they are always irritating and annoying to everyone else.

Really, just because you think that the Looney Tunes themes is cute doesn't mean that the people around don't view you as an idiot.

I'll take a stab at it

[Swamii]

I spent three days of productive work time listening to polyphonic ringtones...in a meeting, this phone's gonna go off-- what are they going to hear?

"You're fired."

Cell Phone

[supe]

I don't have a cell phone you insensitive clods!

My Favorite

[nate nice]

I still use one of the default ring tones, the one that goes "burddt-burdddt". It's identical to what solid snake has on his codec in the Metal Gear Solid games. I use it because when I get calls, I feel like Snake getting more intelligence from HQ! It makes my life really exciting sometimes! I must go now, HQ needs me to pick milk up from the ammo dump....I mean store.

Re:I say this..

[PoopJuggler]

Are you suggesting that there are more important things going on in the world besides the latest sale at Old Navy and how many cute guys will be at the Good Charlotte concert?

Albatross

[linuxwrangler]

Sometimes I feel like John Cleese yelling, "It's f***ing seabird f***ing flavored".

I want my stereo to play music.

I don't need my phone to play a bad rendition of some tune - I want it to ring.

I want my beer to taste like, um, beer - not razzberries, lemons, etc.

Maybe I've become an old coot. But is sure saves me money.

BTW, I selected the "falling rockets" built in ring on my Nokia. Everyone hates that tone (my wife says, "your phone is crying") so I've never heard that ring on another phone. Perfect - I never have to do the "self-frisk" whenever a phone rings.

Re:Albatross

[xgamer04]

... I never have to do the "self-frisk" whenever a phone rings.

A friend of mine told me about the training day for the campus student computing helpdesk: "picture 20 geeks in a room. Then a cellphone goes off. Every one of them checks to see if it's theirs. It was beautiful."

Craze explained

[ackthpt]

Seriously, I do not understand the level of popularity that ringtones have acheived - especially considering that they cost money!

So someone can show their individuality (just like everone else.)

Or (the Reader's Digest version)

Moo.

Ringtone...

[lxt]

Someone should make a audio file ringtone that says "I'm terribly sorry - it's my phone"... :)

Re:The only ringtone needed EVAR

[yoblin]

I'll second that... I bought a 20 dollar data cable JUST so I could get the perfect version onto my phone. It brings a smile to the face of geeks and non-geeks alike...

Re:What are they going to hear?

[ackthpt]

I'd like to meet the idiot who thought playing a sound was a good idea while turning the phone OFF... FLIPPIN' IDIOTS..

Not a Windows XP user, are you?

disable,disable,disable,disable,disable,disable,di sable,disable

Bananaphone

[mrycar]

I have two real annoying ringtones. One humorously annoying and the other has people seeking me out everytime they hear it.

Bananaphone by Raffi

Everybody Everybody!! from Homestarrunner

Bananaphone has people at work call me so they can hear the song.

Never saw the need for the ringtone company though, past phones permitted me to type in songs, when I was bored in a meeting. Current Phone permits me to take any sound out there wav, mp3, midi, etc and play it. Heck I can even record annoying phone calls and make them ring tones. :)

A-ding-ding-ding, etc.

[ettlz]

I can tell it's my phone ringing because it's the only one in the vicinity that sounds like a phone and not the sped-up voice some deranged individual trying to sound like a two-stroke engine being passed off as the voice of some godforsaken Blu-Tac-coloured Smurf-orc menace.

People in the UK, Europe, and possibly further afield know exactly to what I am referring.

Just think of how many hungry mouths could be fed by the money spent on downloading this monstrosity. Just think how many phone-calls could be made. Shameful.

Re:What are they going to hear?

[DaveAtFraud]

We keep a copy of a "Dilbert" cartoon from a while ago (7/4/03). The scenes are:

1) Alice hearing somebody's cell phone going off on the other side of the cube wall.
2) Alice glaring at cell phone sitting on work-surface (owner missing).
3) The owner asking Alice if she has seen his cell phone and her responding "Was it metallic, noisy and flushable?"

A copy generally finds its way to the people who leave their phone at their desk. Most people get the hint so we haven't flushed one yet.

I used to have Kraftwerk - The Telephone Call

[TheLittleJetson]

I had the chorus from this great song. Took the time to program it myself on my first mono-tone cell phone. "I give you my affection and I give you my time, trying to get a connection on the telephone line!" -- I thought I was so witty (well, I was). Unfortunately in 2 years of having the phone, only one person ever recognized it and said something. Now I vibrate. :-P

making ringtones from old PC demos

[rsw]

A buddy of mine and I decided that the ringtones we really really really wanted were the music from isi and Final isi. This is no mean feat, however: our phones (Sanyo SCP-8100s) only play midi and some crappy .wav format, and the latter is clearly unacceptable (both because it's limited in length to 30 seconds and because... well... it's just not cool enough!).

So what did we do? Jim modified DOSBOX's OPL3 emulation code to dump out the opcodes being sent to the FM channels and handed over the output to me.

From there, it was a matter of parsing the various channel setup data into some semblance of notes, deciding which combination of general MIDI patches best emulated the sound of the FM synthesizer given the patchset on my phone, and writing a whole bunch of code.

In the end, we did it: isi.mid and fisi.mid are the full soundtracks to isi and Final isi, respectively. In addition, I made a couple other versions of the Final isi soundtrack to skip to various parts of it that are more interesting and/or make better ringers than starting at the beginning: fisi2.mid, fisi3.mid.

These ringers pretty much rule the roost.

-rsw

What about a history of You-Have-Mail sounds?

[serutan]

Years ago, a guy I worked with audio-edited the Windows "You have mail" voice with a Southpark clip. So about every 20 minutes it said, "OH MY GOD!!! ... you have mail ... YOU BASTARD!!!"

The guy himself was incredibly annoying, but I never got tired of hearing that. Seems funny even now.

Re:wow

[Dogtanian]

What I don't understand is why people purchase ringtones at all when almost every phone I've dealt with accepts MIDI formatted music of one type or another. There are websites that have have huge collections of MIDI.

I agree completely. I have Jimi Hendrix, Metallica and AC/DC MIDI ringtones on my phone.

You should see some of the looks I get! I don't know why, it's not like Hendrix's guitar sounds any better than General MIDI patch 029, is it?

Though I'm not sure that "bagpipes" was the best instrument to render Metallica in....

Re:Ringtones are one of the dumbest things to pay

[Anonymous Coward]

I've seen it over and over again, people buy very strange things.

You said it. Here's another example

Re:The only ringtone needed EVAR

[wojci2]

Bah. For a while I used the scream of a Shadow ship (from B5) as my ringtone. I imagine that my co-workers hated me for it.

I never paid for a ringtone, since I can upload a any wav/ringtone to my phone using bluetooth.