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A ring tone is the sound made by a telephone when ringing. The term is most often used to refer to the customisable sounds available on mobile phones. The facility was originally provided so that people would be able to determine when their phone was ringing when in the company of other mobile phone owners.
A phone only rings when a special "ring signal" is sent to it. For regular telephones, the ring signal is a 90-volt 20-hertz AC wave generated from the switch that the telephone is connected to. For mobile phones, the ring signal is a specific radio-frequency signal.
An alternative to a ring tone is a vibrating alert. It is especially useful:
- in noisy environments
- in places where ring tone noise would be disturbing
- for the hearing impaired
Popularity Ring tones, along with operator logos, have proven a popular method of personalising phones — a major industry has popped up to tailor to the needs of people to customise their phones, and newer phones include features to allow users to create their own tones. Many people enjoy their personalisation of the phones, but some find certain ring tones annoying in public and in certain public situations.
Many companies have set up businesses selling ring tones, advertising them on television and web sites. One criticism of the industry is the subscription some companies lock customers into, requiring them to actively cancel their account or be charged for unwanted messages and ring tones sent to them on a weekly basis.
The sale of ring tones has also been a massive boost to the record industry, earning them extra revenues through royalties.
Types of ring tone
Monophonic Early phones had the ability to have ring tones programmed into them using an internal ring tone composer. Later, various formats were developed to enable ring tones to be sent via text using RTTL encoding.
Polyphonic Many phones are now able to play more complex polytones; up to 40 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 a better sound quality. Some polyphonic ring tones are now almost as good as the original records, and the quality is continually improving. It is likely only a matter of time before all new mobile phones are produced with polyphonic capabilities.
Voice A new version of ring tones, called voice ring tones, true tones, or dead ringers, now use actual pieces of music, along with all lyrics and the entire song backing music, including backing singers. They are usually contained in MP3, WAV, or AMR format that can be used as a ring tone on many series 60, symbain or smart phones. Many cell phone manufacturers are including voice ring tones on most of their newly released phones, including Motorola, Nokia and Sony Ericsson.
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