The most popular way of listening to music today isn’t the CD, nor is it the radio - it’s the ringtone...that tiny, lo-fi, counter-intuitive sound we hear any number of times a day or night from any number of mobile phones.
My favorite ringtone at the moment belongs to Dom who runs The Cottage Cafe in Hoxton. It’s the music box tune from the film The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. It sounds both really cool and ominous every time it rings. Best film ever made Dom explains...He certainly wont hear any argument from me. A photographer friend of mine from Holland actually has a ringtone that sounds like a gun being fired, a realistic metallic sound which makes him laugh every time he hears it...It’s the kind of ringtone humour that might not go down too well on a London bus, but seems to have the desired effect in Amsterdam...An upper school teacher I know downloaded the vocal hook to the dance hall classic Ring The Alarm by Tenor Saw for her phone - a reminder of her own, less responsible school days...
Without too much effort the ringtone announces something distinct about us - our own public signature tune. The sound of Grime and UK Funky owe almost as much to the raw unpolished sonic of the ringtone as they do to the gritty inner-city experiences of their Mcs and producers. And while we happily associate these artists with urban (read black) music, that digital sound, which many radio programmers claim to be too unpalatable for mainstream audiences, has - through the mobile - already become a familiar part of everyones sonic landscape.
Unlike the seclusion and anonymity created by our mp3 players, our ringtone brands us in a way that nothing else can, allowing us a level of self-expression which either amplifies or completely contradicts the way we're perceived by the outside world - like gentle piano piece by Debussy coming from the phone of a supposed 'mall-rat' or the ringtone from ‘Serious’ by JME bellowing from the Blackberry of an otherwise nondescript ‘suit'.
With something more akin to a T-shirt or a pair of limited edition sneakers, the ringtone goes further than our favourite band or the most played track on our iPod in reflecting and telling the world what we’re about.
This process goes some way to explaining why we often hear kids playing music aloud on their phones, sitting at the back of the bus or on trains without any apparent consideration for other passengers; they’re self-broadcasting, announcing their taste, projecting their identity and grabbing a momentary slice of celebrity for themselves.
Our own ringtones, cutting through the air with complete disregard for time or place has a similar effect - announcing our presence in an increasingly faceless, monotone world. Maybe, we’re not so different from those kids after all.
My current mobile phone is, I'm informed, one of the cheapest on the market. It cost me £4.99. Its loudest setting is vibrate; I dread to think what that says about me...
