Cell phones allow users to personalize ring tones

PT photo by Jessica Muddell

Forget the sheet music! Many new cell phone models offer options that allow users to download ringtones of their choice-from Mozart to Devo.

By Kelly O’Neil
Staff Writer

In the privacy of your home, when the telephone rings you go over to the wall or desk or wherever you placed it last and answer it.

When you are out and about and hear a telephone ring, you might mistakenly reach for your cell phone – only to discover that it’s the guys phone next to you that was ringing. That can be embarrassing.

To alleviate this problem, companies offer personalized ring tones that can be purchased with paid subscriptions or for-fee downloads, usually between $1 and $5. This is a relatively new market that has amazing potential to garner huge profits.

On a global scale, ring tone sales passed the $1 billion mark last year, according to the Mobile Music report from the Baskerville research group. Americans spent more than $18 million in 2002 customizing their cell phone rings and are expected to spend as much as $50 million this year by downloading 50,000 ring tones per day. Motorola hellomoto.com phone customization website has seen ring tone downloads increase 597 percent in the last two quarters.

More than 550 million wireless phone subscribers will use ring tones by 2006, according to the Arc Group market research firm. The Detroit metro area leads the United States in cell phone use. Scarborough Research estimates that 69 percent of area households have a mobile phone. In total, there are about 123 million wireless subscribers in the U.S.

Record companies and mobile service providers are collaborating on subscription services, such as Sprint’s 90-day $3.99 streaming package that sends samples of new and pre-released Warner Music Group artists to phones on demand. For $2 per download, Warner’s Celebrity Voice Ringers enable fans to have their favorite rapper’s voice announce incoming calls.

Some artists have even begun composing special ring tones. It is becoming part of the marketing process.

“…. [Artists] go to the studio, record your album, pick the single, make the music video, create the ring tone,” said Michael Nash, senior vice president of Warner’s Internet strategy and business development. “I think that they are seeing that this is a cool, creative medium.”

Music streaming to phones is limited right now to only small clips and samples, because phones can store only four megabytes of downloaded material. However, as battery life and storage capacities increase there can be room for more advanced ring tones incorporating more music and even animation.

All ready available in Japan, polyphonic ring tones will soon be heard in America. Instead of a ring producing one tone at a time, it will be able to play up to 16 tones simultaneously, like an orchestra.

“We see this as a very important promotional medium,” said Nash. “This is going to very quickly translate into tens of millions of dollars.”

A person’s cell phone and ring tone are a reflection on an individual’s personality. Other packages that will soon be the norm will be bundles of ring tones with special screen art. For example, you could have the Yankee baseball face plate, with ‘Take Me Out to the Ballgame,’ ‘Yankee Doodle,’ or the YES network’s theme song played for incoming calls, a visual replay of Derek Jeter sliding into home plate on your screen, and a live statistics ticker on game days.

Europe and Japan developed a “phone fetish” long before Americans did. Overseas it is not uncommon to own a $1,000 cell phone as a status symbol and youth may change their ring tones daily.

Short Message Service (SMS), the function that allows for text messaging, has made downloading ring tones and upgrading phones a lot easier. Before SMS downloaded songs directly, one had to go online to the sites that carried the desired ring tone, then download the ring tone to the home computer, then transfer the ring tone to the phone using infrared signals. How confusing.

Despite all these new music streaming possibilities, you still may not find a song that suits you but want more to your phone than the preprogrammed ring, there are still opportunities to personalize your phone.

“I composed my own cell phone ring,” says Christine Moritz, a senior music education major. Her Nokia phone came with a composer section. “I really like it because I always know when my phone is going off.”

Unfortunately sometimes when your phone goes off you wish it wasn’t yours.

Senior history/elementary education major Anne Marie Trinkleback recalls an incident last semester when her phone rang in the middle of lab.

“I swore I would never be the person who that would happen to,” she said. “Yet there I was trying to sit on my backpack to muffle the sound.”

Cell phones, especially now with the specialized ring tones, can be a rude distraction. It could be blasphemous if a phone with 50 Cent’s, ‘In the Club’ or Jay-Z’s, ‘Big Pimpin’’ went off in the middle of a religious ceremony.

Erin Zapcic, a sophomore communication major, remembers during a performance of “Godspell” at her high school when a cell phone, to the tune of the Mexican hat dance, went off during the most solemn part of the show when the characters are saying goodbye to Jesus. Most theatres, performance halls, and classrooms now ask audience members to turn off their phones. However, this plea is hardly foolproof.

A new technology is currently undergoing testing in Australia called Q-Zone. The system can communicate with mobile phones to control their ring volumes and switch them to silent upon entering specific quiet zones. Ringing can automatically be muffled within a 33-foot coverage area.

Q-Zone utilizes Bluetooth technology that creates a short-range radio link between electronic devices telling them to change volume settings. The inventors of Q-Zone are talking with mobile phone manufacturers to have the software placed in Bluetooth-enabled phones for the system to work and hopefully become a standard feature in the next two years.

Time will tell if patrons of the arts embrace this new technology, but Golan Levin most likely will not. Levin is the composer of ‘Dialtones (A Telesymphony)’ that premiered September 2, 2001, at the Arcs Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria. The piece is orchestrated for 200 cell phones.

“The mobile phone’s speakers and ringers make it a performance instrument,” the American composer said. “The buttons make it a keyboard and remote control. Its programmable rings make it a portable synthesizer.”

For the piece to work, audience members are asked to register their cell phone numbers in the lobby of the auditorium prior to the concert. The mobile phone owner then receives a seating assignment and a melodic ring tone automatically downloaded onto the phone.

During the concert, a small group of musicians, including Levin, will “perform the phones” by dialing them up with a specially designed, musical software instrument. Some of the ring tones heard will mimic nature sounds, such as crickets, cicadas, frogs, and birds. The audience is instructed not to answer their phones during the concert.

Cell phones now seem to be an integrated part of our culture, so don’t be surprised if you hear the melodious sounds of Mozart’s ‘Turkish March,’ Devo’s ‘Whip It,’ the Austin Power’s theme song, or even the clucking of a chicken as you stroll through campus.

Lori Michael, a senior English major sums it by saying, “Cell phones are the devil.”

March 27, 2003 Issue