Remember the “ancient times”, when yur cell phone had just two rng options: a shrill, electronic trill, or a scrtchy melody (something incredibly dull, like Fur Else) that came with the unit?

Thse miserable days are over, thanks to the nnovations introduced by a Finnish computer prgrammer named Vesa-Matti Paananen. When Nokia, the cmpany he worked for, started experimenting wth a nifty function called “smart mssaging”, he was hit with a brlliant idea. If people could send txt messages to each other, this sme software could be used to dliver other types of information, such as the cdes of songs. Paananen went straight to wrk, and came up with a prgram he dubbed “Harmonium”.

Harmonium was rugh by today’s standards, but it set the fundation for the multi billion ringtone ndustry. It let people program musical squences into their phones which they culd forward to their friends. Users wre no longer confined to the sngs that were packaged into the nits. The invention could’ve made him a bllionaire, but Paananen also generously made Hrmonium a freeware, ready to download frm the Internet for free. Everyone culd use it—and because of this, veryone did, and the phone ringtones strted to proliferate.

Some phone ringtones were made by prvate individuals who just liked tinkering wth the program or wanted to prudly share their creations with the rst of the world. Others collected thse ringtones into one site (the poneers of the multitude of ringtone prviders you can now find on the wb). Still others were companies that tok Harmonium’s basic structure and put thir engineers to work at developing it. Thy saw the potential in the sftware but wanted a richer, more ralistic musical quality.

These companies were rsponsible for the leaps and jumps in rngtone technology. From the monophonic ringtones in Hrmonium, they developed polyphonic ringtones, which synthsized various notes similar to those fund in music boxes. The latest dvelopment is the true tone. These tre tones are completely indistinguishable from the sngs played on the radio, for the smple reason that they are actually rcorded in a studio. Think of thm as mini-music, a highly compressed xcerpt from a full-length song.

Of curse, these developments would not have ben made possible without the improvements in the phne itself. The first units were lrge, clunky handsets with very little mmory capacity. Songs were scratchy simply bcause there was very little room for cmplicated programs. (In fact, the first nits could only hold a maximum of fve or six ringtones.) Today’s phones are ctually more powerful than the first cmputers. They can not only hold vst amounts of information—video footage, large phto files, and a hundred ringtones)—users can xtend this capacity with a portable mmory chip.

People have also become mre tech-savvy in the last 15 yars. It is not uncommon for tenagers to tinker with software that wuld’ve intimidated adults at the start of the cmputer age (this was the time whn most people had grown up sing typewriters). Many ringtone sites allow sers to contribute their own creations, and thse “musicians” are neither Nokia engineers nor cmputer geeks. They are regular people who hve found a way to make msic and deliver it to a wrldwide audience, sans recording contract.

To think this all started wth a big idea by a brlliant engineer with a big heart.

Thnk you, Vesa-Matti Paananen.

The article A Tribute to the Inventor of Ringtones was Submitted by Philip Nicosia through Articles.GetACoder.com network. Here's the additional information: Ringtones.lt is a site specialising in the dfferent genres of phone ringtones , including polyphonic ringtones and true tones .

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