March 05, 2005
Let us now praise the ringtone
In the current New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones has a superb little essay in praise of the ringtone. Most specifically, he's intrigued by the aesthetics of creating something catchy out of the teensy, MIDI-like constraints of ringtone polyphony. As Frere-Jones points out, every ring includes a zillion tiny aesthetic decisions:
The ringtone also teaches us how songs work. Which clip best exemplifies a song? Did the ringtone’s maker select the right bit? Do you even need to hear the singing? Perhaps the part of the song that arouses our lizard brain is the instrumental opening. It may be stranger and more sublime to hear a polyphonic impression of George Michael’s voice than to listen to the real thing one more time. If a song can survive being transposed from live instruments to a cell-phone microchip, it must have musically hardy DNA. Many recent hip-hop songs make terrific ringtones because they already sound like ringtones. The polyphonic and master-tone versions of “Goodies,” by Ciara, for example, are nearly identical. Ringtones, it turns out, are inherently pop: musical expression distilled to one urgent, representative hook. As ringtones become part of our environment, they could push pop music toward new levels of concision, repetition, and catchiness.
He goes on to lament the rise of the "master tone", which is not a polyphonic recreation of the original pop song, but a literal sample -- a snippet of the song itself. Since it's merely a cut-and-pasted chunk of the original, it doesn't have any of the through-the-looking-glass qualities that make polyphonic recreations so necessarily surreal. But since the master tone is now taking over, as Frere-Jones concludes, "polyphonic-ringtone nostalgia is approximately six months away."
I kind of agree with him. Though many ringtones annoy the heck out of me -- and, as I discovered while doing research for New York in January, ringtones can actually increase your body's histaminic stress levels -- they're a curious artform, part metaphor and part metonym: Both a version of the thing and the thing itself.
Posted by Clive Thompson at March 05, 2005 08:33 PM
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>> he's intrigued by the aesthetics of creating something catchy out of the teensy, MIDI-like constraints of ringtone polyphony
Meh. If he was into it, he'd have been impressed by these very same aesthetics in the 8-bit gaming era. Because, if a song's successful transition to a ringtone tells you a lot about its inherent "musical DNA", then what does that say about 8-bit chiptunes transformed into orchestral scores?
chiptunes 4 life.
>> he's intrigued by the aesthetics of creating something catchy out of the teensy, MIDI-like constraints of ringtone polyphony
Meh. If he was into it, he'd have been impressed by these very same aesthetics in the 8-bit gaming era. Because, if a song's successful transition to a ringtone tells you a lot about its inherent "musical DNA", then what does that say about 8-bit chiptunes transformed into orchestral scores?
chiptunes 4 life.
oops, sorry about the double.
How I loathe the sound of ringing phones. Maybee its negative conditioning from auditoriums where someone's phone is always interupting, but I abhor the sound of even my own phone. Rather than than to make artistry out of phone's sounds, I would like to see someone make a phone that grabs no attention but the attention of its owner.
See also, the live organist who plays a little song at the hockey faceoff. Enjoy them while you can, they're being replaced by mondo sound systems.
Nowak, excellent point -- the true geniuses of teensy MIDI music are the guys who did the music for the 80s-class games!
J., yep, I've long wondered why phones don't have a winder range of programmable vibration modes -- different vibrations for different callers. It'd make it way easier and less disturbing for people around you if you could know who was calling without even removing your phone from your pocket.
Serial catowner, that is indeed a tragedy!
What about the importance of the pause? Ringtones are often annoying because rather than the conventional "Noise" "pause" "noise" they just make a constant sound until answered or the caller hangs up. I wonder if there isn't something important about the repetition and that silence. Ringtones never seem to work within that constraint which is odd since whole genres of electronic music are based on how satisfying repetition can be. Maybe "rings" should be more about beats instead of melodies?
