11/23/2023 0 Comments Country ringtones for cell phones![]() The United States accounted for only three hundred million of these dollars, although Consect predicts that the figure will double this year. Nevertheless, according to Consect, a marketing and consulting firm in Manhattan, ringtones generated four billion dollars in sales around the world in 2004. Ringtones of either variety cost about two dollars and are typically no more than twenty-five seconds long. Called a master tone, or true tone, it is a compressed snippet of actual recorded song, and emanates from the cell-phone handset as if from a tiny radio. Recently, the polyphonic ringtone acquired a competitor. Companies called aggregators, which collect and distribute digital content, capitalized on Paananen’s innovation, using his software to create what is today known as the polyphonic ringtone: a small packet of code that plays the phone as if it were a music box, producing a synthesized approximation of a song that often sounds less like the original it emulates than a gremlin making merry inside a video game. Those familiar with Linux, the freely available, open-source operating system developed by Linus Torvalds, another Finnish programmer, will not be shocked to learn that Paananen, in a nationally consistent fit of altruism, put Harmonium on the Internet for anyone to download, thus passing up a shot at becoming a billionaire. Paananen developed software called Harmonium that enabled people to program their cell phones to make musically complex sequences-melodies with rudimentary harmonic and rhythmic accompaniment-that they could forward to friends using smart messaging. At about this time, Nokia, the Finnish cell-phone company, introduced “smart messaging,” a protocol that allowed people to send text messages to one another over their phones, and Vesa-Matti Paananen, a Finnish computer programmer, realized that it would work equally well for transmitting bits of songs. It could “ring”-our anachronistic word for the electronic trill that phones produce when you receive a call-or it could play a single-line melody, like “Für Elise.” If you’ve ever heard a cell phone bleep out Beethoven without the harmony, you’ll understand that this wasn’t much of a choice. In 1997, your cell phone could make two kinds of sounds.
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