Introduction
On mobile phones, a ring tone is a brief audio file played to indicate an incoming call. A contemporary ring tone might consist of several bars of a familiar musical tune. Such ring tones are popular because, in a crowd of people with many cellular phone sets, they make it easy to tell whose phone is calling out for attention. The proliferation of cellular telephones in recent years has given rise to a wide variety of ring tones.
Different Types of Ring tones
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
It is the Musical Instrument Digital Interface MIDI that enables the creation of polyphonic musical compositions with different sounds. 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 40 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 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, WAV, QCP, or AMR format that can be used as a ring tone on many Series 60, Symbian or smart phones. Many cell phone manufacturers are including voice ring tones on most of their newly released phones, including Motorola, Nokia and Sony Ericsson.
