How Nokia ringtones became the first viral earworms

One of the internet’s better-known ringtone archivists was barely alive to witness the golden age of his biggest hobby. The 20-year-old Scottish musician, who prefers to be known by his online handle Fusoxide, got hooked through an Alcatel flip phone he had as a kid. “I love the sound of old ringtones, partly due to nostalgia and partly because I think there’s genuine underlooked gems,” he says. Today, Fusoxide is behind the popular @ringtonebangers Twitter account. With others, like @OldPhonePreserv, he helps to maintain Andre Louis’ phonetones directory — a repository of phone software, sound banks, ringtones, and audio ephemera from a bygone era. 

Reaching out to Fusoxide about a defining part of my lived childhood — the ’90s were a very special but awkward teething period for mobile phones — feels like a weird dream where time makes no sense. It sends me down a YouTube rabbit hole of old Nokia ringtones until I realize that my cat hates them and isn’t afraid to tell me. As he howls in confusion at the shrill bleeps, I realize that if you yanked me back to 2002 after years of quiet, discreet phone etiquette, I would probably feel the same. And yet, my curiosity remains. With younger people interested in ringtones, how have perceptions changed about their origins, and how have ringtones lived on in modern soundscapes?

The groundbreaking ringtone work at Nokia is largely kept alive by hobbyists who extract ringtones from old firmware. “Sometimes the firmware is encrypted so it’s near impossible to get the files,” Fusoxide explains. “A lot of the time these packs are handled by more experienced people.” His love for the cultural aspects of the medium has made @ringtonebangers into more than just a casual archive thanks to his ongoing efforts to ask composers for files and interviews; some of his famous followers include music critic Anthony Fantano and Rebecca Black, whose new music proves that ringtones still have a palpable echo in pop production, decades after their peak.

Ringtone culture arguably began in the mid-’90s with the Nokia Tune, which borrowed from the song “Gran Vals” by classical guitarist Francisco Tárrega. Wherever you went back then, it was impossible to escape the sound of Tárrega’s greatest legacy. Timo Anttila, one of Nokia’s early in-house composers, bought his first phone, a Nokia 2110, in 1996. “Suddenly everybody got their own phone and everyone wanted to have personal ringtones and background images,” he says. “First buzzer tunes were… really annoying, but those were iconic and changed the sonic environment quite dramatically.” When Nokia unveiled the world’s first polyphonic ringtone in 2002, piercing melodies became a ubiquitous part of daily life and took on new significance as a form of personal expression.

The groundbreaking ringtone work at Nokia is largely kept alive by hobbyists

        Besides Anttila, the Nokia sound team was made up of young composers like Hannu af Ursin and Henry Daw as well as Aleksi Eeben, Markus Castrén, and contractors like Ian Livingstone and Noa Nakai. Castrén and Eeben were involved in the demoscene where experimental coders and artists pushed the boundaries of computer-generated art and music. Af Ursin was an underground DJ who co-ran a club night called Miau! in Tampere, Finland. “We made quite a few tracks and some of them ended up in great places like Global Underground,” he says. 

https://www.theverge.com/c/23290332/nokia-ringtones-music-history

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