Monophonic
Ringtones
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 SMS text, for example RTTL encoding.
Polyphonic Ringtones
Polyphonic means that
multiple notes 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 128 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 better sound quality. Polyphonic ringtones
are based upon midi sequences so can pool in the 100+ different
midi sounds, many polyphonic capable phones are able to play
standard midi files, others play sp-midi which is scalable polyphony
and depending on the number of channels the phone can play the
handset will render that many notes. On an old polyphonic capable
phone may play 4 notes at once with the flasher new handsets
being able to render 128 notes at once. Many phones support SMAF
(.mmf) files which is based upon a sound format devised by Yamaha.
Music Tones/Real Tones
A new version of ring
tones, often called either music ring tones, voice tones, realtones,
singtones 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 AAC, MP3, WMA,
WAV, QCP, or AMR format that can be used as a ring tone on many
Series 60, Symbian or smartphones. Many cell phone manufacturers
are including voice ring tones on most of their newly released
phones, including Motorola, Nokia and Sony Ericsson. The first
real music ringtone was created by Richard Fortenberry and Brad
Zutaut and was sent over the Sprint network. They were two of
the founders of a company called Xingtone. It was from a song
by the band Devo
|
