How Mobile Ringtones Developed

It may be difficult to believe, but the first ring tone wasn’t on a cell phone. The technology dates back to the 1970s. A ring tone, after all, is a tone used to indicate an incoming call on a telephone and telephones have existed for well over a hundred years.

in 1975, the FCC ruled that third-party devices could be connected to telephone lines. This cleared the way for the traditional bell ringers to be replaced by electronic tone and melodies created by a variety of manufacturers. Some inventive individuals even made their own ringers, by attaching the chip from a musical greeting card to their phones, resulting in an electronic song being played for each incoming call.

These were a long way from the modern cell phone ring tones. Most of these early electronic ringers were a single tone repeated or a melody produced by only two or three tones. Anyone with a cordless land line can still hear these old school ring tones on a daily basis.

In 1996 the first mobile phone was released that had customizable ring tones. These allowed users to choose from preset songs recorded in MIDI format . By 1996, it was possible for phone owners to record their own songs, rather than relying on preset ones. These phones were available in Japan, where customization quickly became the norm.

By 1998 it became possible to download ringtones from a service in Finland and later in Japan. These allowed cell users to create and download their own monophonic ring tones using SMS technology. Today, of course, there are many sites to download free ringtones , including full songs, snippets, as well as spoken words and other sounds. Users can also create their own ring tones from their personal music collection or record the sound of their own voice or their dog barking, if they so desire.