Short History of Cellphone Ringtones 511
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?'"
A shorter history of ringtones (Score:5, Funny)
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!
The sound of silence (Score:5, Funny)
Among polite people, or, failing that, with a mobile phone jammer enabled--nothing.
Meetings... (Score:5, Funny)
Ringtone story (Score:5, Funny)
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.
This Story is about PHONES!! (Score:3, Funny)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Re:The sound of silence (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Fav ringtones (Score:1, Funny)
No! No more tunes! (Score:4, Funny)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
"You're fired."
Cell Phone (Score:4, Funny)
My Favorite (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The sound of silence (Score:2, Funny)
Doesn't help to start things off with a pissed judge.
Re:I say this.. (Score:2, Funny)
Re:A shorter history of ringtones (Score:5, Funny)
and a few seconds later you say "Pardon me Miss, but when I was your age we didn't slap strange people at cafes."
Albatross (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Craze explained (Score:3, Funny)
So someone can show their individuality (just like everone else.)
Or (the Reader's Digest version)
Moo.
Ringtone... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:The only ringtone needed EVAR (Score:2, Funny)
Re:What are they going to hear? (Score:3, Funny)
Not a Windows XP user, are you?
disable,disable,disable,disable,disable,disable,di sable,disable
Bananaphone (Score:3, Funny)
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. (Score:2, Funny)
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 [bbc.co.uk].
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? (Score:5, Funny)
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 (Score:3, Funny)
making ringtones from old PC demos (Score:4, Funny)
So what did we do? Jim modified DOSBOX [sourceforge.net]'s OPL3 [vutbr.cz] 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 [mit.edu] and fisi.mid [mit.edu] 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 [mit.edu], fisi3.mid [mit.edu].
These ringers pretty much rule the roost.
-rsw
Re:Meetings... (Score:3, Funny)
Especially if you uploaded a Styx [styxworld.com] ringtone.
What about a history of You-Have-Mail sounds? (Score:3, Funny)
The guy himself was incredibly annoying, but I never got tired of hearing that. Seems funny even now.
Re:wow (Score:3, Funny)
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:Ringtone story (Score:3, Funny)
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".
Re:Ringtones are one of the dumbest things to pay (Score:1, Funny)
Re:This Story is about PHONES!! (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah. Just take a look at this [wired.com]...
Alas, it doesn't seem to be, uh, compatible with my hardware, but I can't help wondering --- does it work?
Re:A shorter history of ringtones (Score:2, Funny)
Re:The sound of silence (Score:5, Funny)
after that she stopped leaving her cellphone on her desk.
Re:The only ringtone needed EVAR (Score:2, Funny)
I never paid for a ringtone, since I can upload a any wav/ringtone to my phone using bluetooth.
Re:A shorter history of ringtones (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Albatross (Score:3, Funny)
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."