Ringtones

What Are Ringtones?

Ringtones or ring tones are usually associated these days with mobile phones though, originally, the landline or common telephone first made use of ringtones. The ringtone refers to the sound produced by a phone to alert its user of an incoming call.

Mobile phone ringtones were first produced commercially in Finland in the late 1990s. It became popular because the Radiolinja company enabled phone users to choose tones, compose originals and designate them to specific contacts.

How Do Mobile Phone Ringtones Work?

Mobile phone ringtones work somewhat similarly from common telephone ringers. In a landline phone, the caller's phone sends an AC or alternating current to the phone line. This AC is 'tripped' when the landline phone is answered by the person receiving the call.

Mobile phone ringtones also work in the same manner only the energy being transmitted in the phone line is in digital form. These no longer need to be transformed into an AC because the ringing signal is already part of the process of the communication system they receive from cell sites. Digital signals will only be transformed to AC when the mobile phone is contacting a common telephone.

Going into more technical detail, the ringtone of a mobile phone should be understood as a program in its microprocessor or its 'brain.' The ringtone program alerts the microprocessor to signal to the mobile phone speaker to produce a sound when there is a call incoming.

Mobile phones which offer various ringtones store these tones in the memory of the gadget. Ringtones are encoded as different vibration frequencies which the speaker will make when the microprocessor alerts it.

What Are Types of Ringtones?

There are several types of ringtones used in mobile phones. These are truetone, monophonic, and polyphonic ringtones.

Truetone also refers to 'realtone,' 'superphonic ringtone,' or 'mastertone.' This is formatted as an MP3, WMA or AAC so songs, as you hear them in the music player, are played by the speaker when an incoming call is detected. The truetone is one of the later developments in ringtones however, to date, there is the more advanced type called video ringtone.

Monophonic ringtones are the earliest type. These are the ones that are able to play only a single tone of music in a certain time. These are now less popular than truetones and polyphonic tones.

Polyphonic tones are ringtones developed from monophonic tones. Polyphonic tones are those that play more than one tone of music at a given interval. The MIDI or Musical Instrument Digital Interface is sometimes used for this type of ring tone.