The Early Days of the Ring tone

We all know a ring tone is the sound made by a mobile phone or telephone to indicate an incoming call. Newer cell phones can use short pieces of music as ring tones, and the sale of these has become a major sector of the mobile music industry. More of this in another article.

Now I’m going to tell you a bit about monophonic ring tones and the early days of the ring tone. It started with the Nokia Tune, which is a 13 note rendering of Francisco Tarrega's, Gran Vals, who was a 19th-century Spanish musician.

The first ring tones were monophonic, which mean that only one note is played at a time.

Monophonic
Early phones and some basic phones of today play only monophonic ring tones, short tunes played with simple tones. Some of these phones also have the ability to have ring tones programmed into them using an ring tone composer. There are Various formats of monophonic ring tones and they can be sent to a phone via SMS.

Keypress ring tones
Key press ring tones are not popular or used anymore. These ring tones can be directly entered into your cell phone. It’s easier to compose key press ring tones compared to ring tones composer available on some phones. When you key press ring tones you do not need to understand the special symbols that appear on the composer screen.

RTTTL ring tones
RTTTL stands for ring tone Text Transfer Language and it is a format for coding the notes of a ring tone in a universal format. With ring tone converter programs RTTTL ring tones can be converted to other ring tone formats. If you have ring tones on your PC you can uploaded them to your cell phone via a datacable, infrared connection or Bluetooth.

Then in 2002 came the polyphonic ring tone format, but that’s another story. More about ring tone formats