The word “ringtone” comes from the English words “ring” and “tone”. It means an incoming call sound of a telephone. Nowadays it is almost a synonym of a melody set as a mobile phone ring.

The first ringtone.
It’s curious that ringtone appeared a little later than a telephone itself. The telephone invented by A. Bell in 1876 didn’t have any ringtone and a call was realized with a whistle. A ring was offered 2 years later in 1878 by T. Watson. But for a long time ringtone was an ordinary bell ring though electric.

The first mentions of the first real ringtones appeared in the middle of the 20th century when the Popular Eletronix journal in 1956 published the article “Telephones will call with melodies”. That article said: “Telephone users will be glad to know that The Bell Telephone Laboratories is working on a new device which will do away with the boring present-day rings. This device that uses transistors will produce nice sounds like ones of a clarinet”.

Probably, one of the most famous and recognizable ringtones is a “Nokia Tune” built into the Nokia telephones as the default ringtone. It appeared in 1994 (and still holds its positions).

What ringtones can be?
Ringtones have been developing gradually; therefore the existent types of ringtones represent the steps of their development.
Monophonic ringtones contain a notes set and any moment only one note can play. The first mobile phones had such ringtones. They were peeping really nasty.

Polyphonic ringtones can play several notes simultaneously. One of such ringtone formats is MIDI. This is the next step of the ringtones development. The phones that have high-quality MIDI sequencer utter melodies with a good quality of sound. These ringtones can play the sounds of different instruments, but they are almost unable to reproduce a voice.

Realtone is modern and the most commonly used format nowadays. The modern digital formats of music (AAC, WMA, MP3, Ogg, etc.) are used to store records. Thanks to them top-charts and other popular melodies are used as the ringtones.

How can you get a rington?
It’s a strange question, isn’t it? You can download it from friends, buy it (there are lots of different content-providers) or create it youself. You can create a ringtone online or by using the appropriate program – for example, SoundForge or CoolEdit.

It is important to remember that the usage of ringtones is restricted by the copyright law. So you can create, sale or exchange ringtones only in agreement with its rightholder, otherwise you may become even criminally responsible.

The most popular ringtones.
Nobody performed such a research, but the hit parade of the ringtones would look like this:

1. Perhaps the most popular ringtones are those ones installed on mobile phones by default. For example, the above-mentioned Nokia Tune. The most people are too lazy to change something.
2. Classical melodies, for example the immortal compositions by Beethoven “The 5th symphony” and “To Elisa”. They are very pleasant to hear and almost never annoy. Well, they may annoy some people only because there are too much of them.
3. Rock and pop hits.
4. Different merry, annoying, loud, unusual melodies like Crazy Frog or the voice-talker “Hello, this is your mobile phone speaking. You’ve got a call”

P.S. create ringtone online with ringtonizer.com!.?