Mobile Encyclopedia

Ringing endorsements (mobile nokia ringtones)

Suzy Freeman-Greene looks for a ring of authenticity in a digitally dull world of Nokia tunes.

I WAS a little nervous about talking to The Ringtone Society. How do you tell a Dutch art collective, whose entire mission is to free the world from “digitally dull, copycat mobile phone ringtones”, that your own phone is set to the Nokia tune?

Ringtones rule but I’ve been in denial. There are phone tunes made from footy club songs, movie soundtracks, filleted symphonies, national anthems. On the Billboard ringtone charts, the Super Mario Brothers theme is at number one; Henry Mancini’s Pink Panther theme is in sixth place. Two Lynyrd Skynyrd songs also lurk there amid all the fresh hip-hop and sexual energy.

Last year a ringtone called Crazy Frog topped the British and Australian music charts, confirming the ringtone as a new musical genre. It could be a 30-second swoon; a brief, thrilling register of condensed emotion. But most are derivative snippets of the familiar. The Ringtone Society wants to change this by inviting composers to create original works, specifically as ringtones. It sees the ringtone as a new artistic form, an heir to the fugue perhaps. “The variety of ringtones is infinite”, proclaims its manifesto.

The society was formed last year. It began as a rebellious statement, half a gimmick. Now its website is filled with hip-hop, jazz, country, ska, funk-soul, pop-rock, electronic, heavy-metal and spoken word offerings. There are ringtones called “Pick up the phone, bitches”, “A Kraftwerk Orange”, “Please Stop Calling Me” and “Bad News Found You”. There are political ringtones (”My Fellow Americans”) and non-verbal layerings of the voice.

On the phone from Holland, the society’s technical director Maike Fleuren sounds slightly awed by the whole ringtone thing. She describes with amazement her trips to mobile phone shops where she watches kids “pimping their phones” with the latest decorative accessories. When I tell her I’ve had trouble hearing the tunes on the site she suggests I grab any kid aged from eight to 12 and ask for help.

Was there an especially annoying ringtone that prompted the society’s formation? A tinny rendition, perhaps, of Sweet Child O’Mine or one more Zorba the Greek that sounds like it was played on a toy xylophone?

She names the Nokia tune (oops) and Crazy Frog as the chief culprits but also she’s concerned about the wider phenomenon of people selling synthesised, imperfect versions of popular songs without paying royalties to the artists who created them.