Ringtones are one of the most common forms of modern day noise pollution, heard billions of times a day arpeggiating out of ubiquitous buttocks, or even more insidious when unheard—hallucinated in schizophonia—or summoned to mind as earworms, or called forlornly in the mind’s ear while in the throes of nomophobia (the fear of ‘no mobile phone’).

More importantly, for this blog, ringtones are one of the most common forms of musical pollution.

The original ringtone is from the 1991 Nokia phone playing an old guitar waltz melody, Francisco Tarrega’s “Gran Vals”. Drag over the noteheads, or press play to hear the entire phrase. Try to line up the bass notes to hear how it creates a sense of resolution.

Yeah, they don’t make melodies like this anymore—so gay and dignified, spread-eagled across the major key to hit each and every note in turn, almost symmetrical, but even better than perfect parallel symmetry; it makes so much musical sense, it seems as though it’s always been here, since the 90′s when it was copyrighted, to the 1890′s (circa) when it was conceived.

Together, the melody and the bass create a Perfect Cadence—a harmonic progression that demands resolution. In other words, the Perfect Cadence takes you home. Thus, the 1st Ringtone was selected for cadential reasons, the sense of resolution to the Root, just like a phone call, connects you with home. The Perfect Cadence is one of the most satisfying musical devices in popular music, and usually occurs at the end of the song, or like in “Gran Vals” to signify the end of a phrase.

It is estimated that the Nokia ringtone is heard 20,000 times per second, 1.8 billion times per day, far superior to the number of times “Gran Vals” has ever been performed or heard.

Ringtones are the bane of public theater performance. How many concerts and plays, with their stuffy and bourgey audiences, have been stopped for the tiny sine wave bleeping of a cellular ringtone?

The true master musician is the master of her environment, completely at home in her soundscape, she doesn’t so much play the music as get swept up in the score of life.

During a solo performance, the violinist below is interrupted by the ringtone. Without missing a beat, the violinist quickly deciphers the figure, and plays an improvised variation.



You can feel the building tension in the room as the ringtone plays, instantly released by the violinist’s good humor and virtuosic display. What a pro!

This can go much worse, as the recent cellular disturbance at a performance of the New York Philharmonic demonstrates. A pesky iphone marimba played during the end of a Mahler symphony which is apparently enough to get a $1,000 fine and stop the show. It sounds like that was the most memorable moment of the night; the release of tension caused by the hated ringtone, finally allowed people to act naturally—calling for the pariah’s head.

Today, ringtones are an artform all their own (at least, they were 5 years ago), with popular artists such as Timbaland creating specialized albums of ringtones. Even if one of these ‘songs’ is only a few seconds long, it will get infinite more exposure in ringtone form, than in traditional musical form, even if they will be mostly ignored, or despised.

Epiloggies:

Like the ‘arms race of sound’, where popular music albums are becoming louder and louder with each passing year, and consistently louder at each ictus, or the natural analog of this race, where the birds and the bees increase the pitch and frequency of their tunes so they can be heard over the industrial soundscape, the musical pollution of mobile phone ringtones follow a similar trajectory—drowned out by the ambient noise field only to respond with increasing complexity and volume.

The need to be heard is greatest of all friends. And you cannot silence our ringers, not with a thousand fingers. You cannot shush the ten thousands songbirds, and tell them to go sing somewhere else. Listen! They are returning, like a musical cadence, they fly back home on notehead wings, beaks full of nonsense lyrics, syrinxes split into harmony. The season of song is upon us once again. Expect us…