You probably know a ring tone is the sound made by a cell phone to indicate an incoming call. Newer cell phones can use MP3 music as ring tones.

I’m going to tell you a bit about the early days of the ring tone. It all started with the Nokia Tune, which is a 13 note rendering of Francisco Tarrega's, Gran Vals, who was a 19th-century Spanish musician. And this ring tone was monophonic, which mean that only one note was played at a time.

Monophonic

Early phones and sopme basic phones of today play only monophonic ring tones, short tunes played with simple tones. Some of these phones also have the ability to have ring tones programmed into them using a ring tone composer. There are Various formats of monophonic ring tones and they can be sent to a phone via SMS.

Keypress ring tones

Key press ring tones are not popular or used anymore. These ring tones can be directly entered into your cell phone. It’s easier to compose key press ring tones compared to ring tones composer available on some phones. When you key press ring tones you do not need to understand the special symbols that appear on the composer screen.

RTTTL ring tones

RTTTL stands for ring tone Text Transfer Language and it is a format for coding the notes of a ring tone in a universal format. With ring tone converter programs RTTTL ring tones can be converted to other ring tone formats. If you have ring tones on your PC you can uploaded them to your cell phone via a datacable, infrared connection or Bluetooth.

If you hear people talk about SMS ringtones they refers to ringtones that can be downloaded via SMS. SMS ringtones is no technical standard and it was Nokia who originally developed SMS to send short text messages between mobile phones.

Polyphonic ringtones

Then in 2002 came the polyphonic ring tone format. Polyphonic means that multiple notes can be played at the same time using instrument sounds. Many phones today are able to play more complex polytones; up to 128 individual notes with different instruments are played simultaneously.

Cell phone makers have also taken full advantage of new technologies to improve speakers in order to produce better sound quality for ringtones.

More about ring tone formats

The latest ring tones are music ring tones and they use actual pieces of MP3 music.