One should immediately notice the incredibly low pay for what is highly specialized work — the transcription of popular songs. But such ads appear to target young musicians who cannot read musical notation — a skill that both commands higher payment rates and is unnecessary in the creation of ringtones. As such, the industry appears to draw on the very fact that the work being done by ringtone composers is cultural and is thus subject to what Andrew Ross calls the “cultural discount,” or the willingness of culture workers to “discount the price of their labor for love of their craft” [57]. At any rate, this employment pattern seems to be widespread. Also exploiting the availability of talented and underemployed musicians, larger handset manufacturing firms have subcontracted ringtone and mobile music companies to produce preset ringtones. A Norwegian company called Soundonweb has hired 25 musicians to construct ringtones for delivery to the SonyEricsson assembly line. Apparently, the company has ties to Nokia as well, possibly as a subcontracted ringtone provider for the Finnish handset manufacturer [58].
The monophonic ringtone and composer programs that appeared a few years ago gave rise to an even more curious phenomenon. Within the past couple of years, one could easily observe the proliferation of Web sites and chat groups listing hundreds of song titles, each with instructions for inputting monophonic ringtones into different phone formats. Such sites were divided according to language and existed for ringtone enthusiasts interested in particular music genres or repertoires from all over the world, especially those from regions with prominent mobile phone use. Hence, one could find particular Web sites devoted to monophonic ringtones of Japanese anime music, Canto–pop melodies, Bollywood film songs, Hollywood film scores, Western classical tunes, American TV shows, and the like. Some Web sites merely listed song after song in the relevant genre, often dividing them up according to handset manufacturers (who each have different coding languages for ringtones). In other cases, a single song would be posted, with the melody translated into several different manufacturers’ coding languages and listed in a column below the song title. On discussion groups, one might find participants asking each other how to code a particular favorite song or how one would translate a particular set of instructions from one handset maker’s coding language to another’s.
I Love You Bengali Film Ringtone 19
Listening to the song “Gustakhiyan” (or “transgression”) itself helps to clarify how the ringtone was created. The song is essentially a Bollywood–ized piece of dance music, constituting a lavishly produced but highly generic version of an ethnic or tribal house track, on top of which is overlaid a male–female duet characteristic of Hindi film love songs. The track begins with a moderately fast (about 125 beats per minute) “four on the floor” disco/house beat (0:00–0:08) and then adds a sampled layer of a South Asian percussion instrument, probably a tabla (0:08–0:23). The track continues by adding a syncopated synthesizer line that is filtered (along the harmonic series of the tonic) from high frequencies to low frequencies and back up to high frequencies (0:24–0:53), in the manner of much acid house — the synthesizer could be a Roland TB–303 bass synthesizer, the instrument that provides the characteristic sound of acid house music. At 0:54 the male singer enters, singing the melodic line in Example 2 in a highly stylized fashion (reminiscent both of earlier Bollywood singing styles and American dance–pop singers like Michael Jackson and others).
The commonsensical answer to this conundrum is that the original transcriber of the song made a mistake, and the mistake was then replicated in other contexts, ultimately becoming normalized as part of the monophonic ringtone of “Gustakhiyan.” Certainly this is a plausible explanation: the nature of online information is such that it propagates quickly, whether or not mistakes are present. Lacking professional editors who might catch such oversights, other ringtone Web sites often adopt preexisting transcriptions found online rather than redoing the somewhat tedious labor of transcribing melodies. Another explanation, however, might lie in the unusual transliteration of the film and song names (“Ankhein” and “Gustakhian”). Although nonstandard transliterations of Hindi are certainly typical, especially those done in an Urdu context (as these may have been), the discrepancy perhaps implicitly points to the widespread presence of piracy in Asian ringtone production [68]. One might argue that the respellings and even the melodic “error” are subtle attempts to disguise a pirated melody. And it is worth mentioning that the transcription mistake occurs at the lowest point in the melodic line, where the singer slurs over the notes and the lower range is somewhat more covered over by the backing instrumental tracks — the melody thus remains fully recognizable and is still quantifiably different from the original [69].
The pervasive social presence of the mobile phone and ringtone over the past half decade has not remained unregistered in global cultural production. Cell phones have appeared as central accessories or narrative devices in recent Hollywood thrillers like Collateral (2004) and Cellular (2004) and the Chinese film comedy Cell Phone (2004) [94]. Alexander Weheliye has insightfully identified the presence of cell phones in numerous contemporary R&B songs, even arguing that vocoder–like vocal alterations are being used to mimic the low fidelity of cell phone conversations for various expressive purposes [95]. But for the most part the ringtone as an artistic reference point seems to have remained the province of classical composers and media artists — cultural producers whose artistic media are either extremely isolated from or uncomfortably close to new technologies like cell phones. In the case of the former, orchestral musicians including composers of new orchestral works and innovative conductors have attempted to integrate cell phones and ringtone melodies into their compositions, either as bids to make their work more current and socially relevant or to ironically distance themselves from contemporary social phenomena. In one case, British composer Jocelyn Pook produced a 10–minute orchestral piece titled Mobile (2002) based on the Nokia Tune theme by Tarrega, almost as a way to exorcise its irritating presence around her [96]. In another, a light symphonic medley performed in Jerusalem titled Spring Cellphony (2001), a cell phone ringtone sounded the initial part of several famous classical tunes (including Rossini’s William Tell Overture and pieces by Bach and Mozart), with the orchestra finishing the rest of each tune in turn [97]. Also, in 2003 conductor Bernd Kremling of the Drumming Hands Orchestra in Würzburg, Germany performed a composition that uses ringtones of classical composers (Bach, Mozart) and tunes like “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” [98]. In most of these cases, ringtones are mostly novelty effects, often directly poking fun at audience members whose ringtones have interrupted concerts on other occasions. In the most explicit example of such a ringtone usage, American musicologist Peter Schickele, as a performer of music by his composer alter–ego P.D.Q. Bach, composed a concerto in which the soloist’s cellphone goes off just as the soloist enters — with the soloist taking the call [99].
We might interpret the visual, sonic, and technical references of Dialtones in three ways. First, the music in combination with the visual effects seems to evoke a kind of atomized connectedness associated with global digital communications. The phone–triggered LEDs and reflecting mirror activate the otherwise inactive grid, which resembles both an illuminated microchip and a time–lapse–filmed apartment building whose lights somewhat randomly go on and off during the night. At this level, the music seems to be about connectedness, communicating the notion that we as participants are part of a bigger global phenomenon around us — and the participants holding their cellphones up like lighters at rock concerts only underscores this sense [109]. Second, the sonic references seem to evoke a narrative pattern that switches between the “natural” sounds of birds and insects; “human” sounds of ringers, phone–dialing, drumming, and heavy machinery; and the “reflective” sounds of minimalist, minor–mode or modal ostinatos that provide an air of pseudo–profundity to the music. From this view, the music seems to be a high–frequency, video–game–like tone–painting of the history of human development and human society’s evolving relationship with the natural world — but evoked as a daydream triggered by a ringing phone. The work proceeds by portraying the intensifying conflicts between nature and human society, the potential catastrophes of which are hinted at, but never represented, towards the end of the piece [110]. Such a message recalls that of another minimalist masterpiece, Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass’s film Koyaanisqatsi (1982). Borrowing its title from a Hopi word meaning “life out of control,” the film’s time lapse images of nature and human society, taken and edited by Reggio, provide testimony for rampant global development and its untold ecological damage. The film image is perfectly juxtaposed with Glass’s repetitive score, which communicates profound stasis and monumentality at times and buzzing activity at others. Indeed, Dialtones might be viewed as a contemporary recomposition or re–imagination of that earlier work — but in this case, Glass’s medieval and Wagnerian minimalist grooves are replaced by loops of beeping timbres produced by cell phone ringtones and dialing tones, evoking video game tunes and electronic dance musics. And for the latter work’s historical moment — which was that of the monophonic ringtone — such a revisiting of the Glass/Reggio collaboration seems to have been particularly apt, given the way that cell phone ring–signals and monophonic ringtones have become almost “naturalized” in modernity. In writing corporate research reports overemphasizing the natural qualities of cell phones, cultural studies scholars like Sadie Plant have helped to make the cell phone seem like a natural phenomenon, arguing that ringing cell phones are a form of “electronic birdsong” [111]. And with the previously mentioned reports that birds have learned to imitate ringtones and that birdsongs are popular as ringtones, the actual conflicts between nature and capitalist technology are yet further mystified [112]. Third, the technical setup of the piece hints at a particularly ominous aspect of cellular technology. The fact that every person’s phone is pre–registered in a database, with many but not all phones being reprogrammed with new ringtones, paints an image of a society constantly under surveillance, with each individual citizen’s strings being pulled at will by a hegemonic force. And the apparent freedom of some to retain their ringtone (as personal statement) is contrasted with the fact that not all participants maintain the “integrity” of their original voices. With profitability and policing going hand in hand in mobile telephony, the piece’s intensification towards the end signals both the ever greater expansion of a society of surveillance and the paranoia that the awareness of such a society engenders. 2ff7e9595c
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