An unforeseen development in the world of mobile phone technology, ring tones were not initially considered to be anything worth talking about even during the early years of mobile phone proliferation.
Sure, you could change the sound your phone would make when it rang – it could sound like your home phone, play a slow three-bar musical excerpt, or make a sharper sound – but few of us gave much thought to that.
It was at the start of this century that people really started to think about the ring tone as something more than just an alert that someone was trying to contact you.
Suddenly, monophonic interpretations of well-known songs started appearing, and people were impressed.
To hear them now would be faintly comical, but at the time it was seen as pretty cool by a lot of people.
The development of polyphonic ring tones then took it up a level. While early efforts at replicating a chart single basically sounded like a series of bleeps with little resemblance to the original, polyphonic technology allowed the replication of guitar, bass and drums among other sounds, to sound more like “the real thing”.
As time has gone on, it has become possible to have an actual recording of the song of your choice as your ring tone, and this is all well and good.
But it does beg the question – if you like music and want to listen to it, surely it is better to just play the song? If someone rings you, isn’t the idea to answer the call as quickly as you can, rather than sit singing along?
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