What are Ring Tones?
A ring tone is the sound made by a telephone
to indicate an incoming call. The term is most often used to refer to the
customizable sounds available on mobile phones. The facility was originally
provided so that people would be able to determine when their phone was ringing
when in the company of other mobile phone owners.
Ring tones are one sector of the mobile music industry.
A phone only rings when a special "ring signal" is sent to it. For regular
telephones, the ring signal is a 90-volt 20-hertz AC wave generated from the
switch that the telephone is connected to. For mobile phones, the ring signal is
a specific radio-frequency signal.
An alternative to a ring tone is a vibrating alert. It is especially useful:
in noisy environments
in places where ring tone noise would be disturbing
for the hearing impaired
Ring tone advertising campaigns have become hugely popular, though they have
also attracted a great deal of criticism.
Types of ring tone
Monophonic
Early phones had the ability to play only monophonic ring tones, short tunes
played with simple tones. These early phones also had the ability to have ring
tones programmed into them using an internal ring tone composer. Various formats
were developed to enable ring tones to be sent via text using RTTL encoding.
Polyphonic
Polyphonic means that multiple tones can be played at the same time using
instrument sounds such as guitar, drums, electronic piano, etc. Many phones are
now able to play more complex polytones; up to 128 individual notes with
different instruments are played simultaneously to give a more realistic musical
sound. Mobile phone handsets manufacturers have taken full advantage of new
technologies to improve speakers in order to produce a better sound quality.
Music ring tones
A new version of ring tones, often called either music ring tones, voice tones,
realtones, singtones or true tones, now use actual pieces of music, along with
all lyrics and the entire song backing music, including backing singers. They
are usually contained in MP3, WMA, WAV, QCP, or AMR format that can be used as a
ring tone on many Series 60, Symbian or smartphones. Many cell phone
manufacturers are including voice ring tones on most of their newly released
phones, including Motorola, Nokia and Sony Ericsson.
Popularity
Ring tones, along with operator logos, have proven a popular method of
personalising phones — a major industry has popped up to tailor to the needs of
people to customise their phones, and newer phones include features to allow
users to create their own tones. Many people enjoy their personalisation of the
phones, but some find certain ring tones annoying in public and in certain
public situations.
Many companies have set up businesses selling ring tones, advertising them on
television and web sites. One criticism of the industry is the subscription some
companies lock customers into, requiring them to actively cancel their account
or be charged for unwanted messages and ring tones sent to them on a weekly
basis.
The sale of ring tones has also been a massive boost to the record industry,
earning them extra revenues through royalties.
The newer phones equipped with Bluetooth or PC-link up however, allow users to
transfer ringtones created on a PC, to their phone, for free. The user could
even record themselves or their own tones and place them on the phone.
The source of this article is
Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this
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