Ringing in the New Year (well, the new school year...)

As much as I love technology, I've always lagged contentedly behind on the cellphone/smartphone train; I don't really like talking on cellphones in the first place, and having the Internet at my fingertips isn't really worth the price of admission for me since I'm near a computer almost all the time.  However, we did just buy the first family smartphone for my wife; it's useful on trips and when out and about, and she's much less likely to over-ride the data plan than I would be. (I never said I wouldn't enjoy having a smartphone.) Meanwhile, I "upgraded" to her old Sony not-so-smart phone. To make this upgrade more exciting, I decided to do a little personalizing.

I'm always astounded that anyone would pay for ringtones (absurdly priced for what you're getting), but then people will also pay ridiculous amounts to send texts that use a fraction of the bandwidth a "free" voice call would require. But aside from the cost, it's just more fun to create your own ringtones. (Perhaps you remember my Rite of Springtone post from the technical dark ages of 2007.) So, last weekend, I sat down with iTunes and Audacity for a couple of hours and came up with this exciting assemblage of ways to be summoned.

I'm not pretending this is a comprehensive list of the best of all possible ringtones - these are just ones that came to mind and for which I had mp3s readily available. You'll notice there are a few works that get raided more than once and a few composers who show up multiple times. Honestly, the difficulty now is deciding which tone to use since I like them all; it almost makes me wish I used my cellphone more regularly. Almost. (If you want to know what's what, you can see the whole playlist here and even download your favorites.)

Of course, aside from making phone calls more exciting, there's something interesting about condensing a large musical work down to a 6-10 second calling card, and it's fun to think about which musical ideas work best for this kind of situation (especially ones that have a sort of "ringing" quality). Maybe that's a subject for another blog post...